As a first post in the Best Practices Gone Bad series, I figured I would take an simple example from a previous job. An Example In that position, there were two best practices that intersected to generate unreadable code. The first practice was expressive names. All names of variables, classes, and methods were required to… Read More »
Most professional fields develop a set of best practices that help people in the field produce consistent solutions to similar problems. Any given problem has an infinite number of potential solutions, some of those will actually work. Fewer still will work well. Best practices tend to prune some of the bad solutions by pointing out… Read More »
In the last post, we had begun streamlining novice Ned’s problem. Our current solution has some problems. The most annoying is the need to type a password for each server that we are going to write to. High-level Description We are using scp to do the copy, so the login is controlled by the SSH… Read More »
In the last post, we spent a small amount of time understanding a problem faced by our hypothetical novice programmer, Ned. As a reminder, let’s revisit Novice Ned’s breakdown of the problem. Launch FTP Connect to the host Log in with the foobar user and password Change to the appropriate remote directory Put each of… Read More »
In an earlier entry, I covered the first thing a programming novice needs to know: how to break down a problem. A short while later, I was talking with a guy at our local Perl user group and he presented me with an actual novice problem he was fighting. After some thought, I realized that… Read More »
When I originally approached this topic, I wanted to explain to those GUI users why a TUI is more powerful. As I tried to write down my opinions, I realized that once again this was more a case of it depends than I had thought. I really should know better by now. In order to… Read More »
As I said in the last entry, you can separate computer users by their user interface preferences. In that entry, I made the argument that a text-based interface (TUI) is better than a graphical interface (GUI). Since that isn’t inflammatory enough, I’m now going to argue that GUIs are better than TUIs. A Short History… Read More »
One of the ways that you can separate groups of computer users into groups is by their preferences in user interfaces. A few decades ago, most computer interfaces were simple text. The display hardware didn’t support fancy graphics, and the processors weren’t fast enough to do the calculations needed for reasonable graphics. As computers and… Read More »
The first skill a new programmer must learn is not what most people expect. It is not learning a programming language. It has nothing to do with algorithms or data structures. The first thing a new programmer must learn is how to identify a small piece of a problem. Solving the Big Problems Most problems… Read More »
Between my earlier career in electronics and my current career in software, I have found a number of questions that have been helpful in troubleshooting problems reported by others. None of these questions are original to me. My wife described troubleshooting a hardware problem over the phone and mentions some of her troubleshooting questions. I… Read More »