In Programmer Musings: More Thoughts on Mastering Programming I referenced the four levels of competence without being able to remember the original source. According to Four Levels Of Competence, the source is the Kirkpatrick Model by Donald L. Kirkpatrick.
Like any natural language, most programming languages support idioms. According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, an idiom is A speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements, as in keep tabs on. A… Read More »
I saw the article Refactoring reminiscent of high school algebra on Artima yesterday and it made me remember a new connection of my own. In the article, David Goodger is working on a refactoring problem that is turning out to be worse than expected. After a little reflection, he manages to solve the problem. But… Read More »
I just recently read Valueless Software, written by Chad Fowler from about a year ago. In this article, he describes an approach to practicing music by ignoring the result and focusing on the process. He contends that software people might benefit from a similar approach. I have actually seen this approach used before in C… Read More »
ACM Queue often has very insightful articles, and this one is no exception. The article ACM Queue – Death by UML Fever – Are you (or your developers) sick? covers a major problem in software development in a somewhat humorous fashion. I’ve seen several variations of this problem, but I never thought of it as… Read More »
Reading Dave Thomas’s blog on Code Kata pointed to PragDave: MoreKata. I also stumbled across How To Practice on Chad Fowler’s blog. Both of these entries discuss exercises that we can use to master the art of programming. Perhaps surprisingly, they use metaphors and concepts from martial arts and Zen. Those of us who have… Read More »
I’m not quite sure what lead me to this blog entry, but I find PragDave: Code Kata by Dave Thomas to be a very interesting idea. I had never thought of describing coding practice as similar to kata. I did stumble into a similar idea once many years ago. I had just finished reading Software… Read More »
Why is it that some people regularly suggest that someday soon we won’t need programmers? I’ve recently been seeing this as part of the IT outsourcing debate. But, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it. The first time I saw this meme was shortly after I started programming professionally 17 years ago. I talked… Read More »
Programming Pearls, Second Edition Jon Bentley ACM Press, Addison-Wesley, 2000 One of my favorite programming books of all time now has a second edition. I’ve got to say it’s as good as the original. Many years ago, I stumbled across Jon Bentley’s Programming Pearls. It is a great book on programming. It did not focus… Read More »
George A. Miller’s paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information discussed some limits of the human brain with respect to information processing. In particular, his research had found that people are unable to keep up with more than 5-9 different chunks of information at a… Read More »