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 »
While I was at YAPC::NA this year, I got a chance to catch up with a few old friends and talk with some really knowledgeable people from other parts of the Perl programming community. One such discussion started when Rob Kinyon told me that exceptions are fundamentally flawed by design and should never be used.… Read More »
The comments from Ian and rlb3 have made me think a bit more on what I said last time about Chronistic Coupling. One thing I didn’t make perfectly clear is that I’m not advocating avoiding Chronistic Coupling at all costs. Any real system will require some amount of Chronistic coupling. The key design point is… Read More »
Many programs have a need to store program state to disk at various points. An approach used by many of these programs is to serialize the objects representing the program state directly to disk (or a database). Back in 2004 (XML-Serialized Objects and Coupling), I described a coupling problem caused by automatically serializing objects to… Read More »
I was listening to an older episode of Software Engineering Radio where they interviewed Martin Odersky on Scala (Episode 62). In the interview, Odersky made a comment about closures being the literals of functional programming. This statement struck me as surprising. The more I thought about it, the more interesting and subtle the concept became.… Read More »
I recently been studying software architecture and have had a minor epiphany. My assumptions about code complexity may have been unnecessarily pessimistic. From my experiences in software development, I have observed that more powerful or more robust systems are naturally more complex. A side effect of this observation is that beginning to do development on… Read More »
There is a technique I have seen used many times in my career called Lazy Initialization. The purpose of this technique is to delay an expensive initialization (or object construction, or calculation) until you actually need it. Just like any technique, Lazy Initialization has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are a pretty obvious: If… Read More »
Beautiful Code Edited by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson O’Reilly, 2007 Although I was really looking forward to reading Beautiful Code when I first heard it was coming out, I found myself a bit disappointed by the reality of the book. Each chapter is written by a different master coders, giving their views on what… Read More »
Long ago, I was trying to convince a friend of mine that Object Oriented programming was not all just snake oil when he asked me a fundamental question. What’s the difference between an object and a thingie? In some ways, this question has guided my understanding of objects ever since. Fundamentally, what makes one collection… Read More »
Continuing the line of thought from last time (Sharp Tools vs. Frameworks), another issue I see in quite a few frameworks and some systems is a code anti-pattern I’ll call The Modular Monolith. We all know that modularity is a good thing to have in a system. Modular code, in general, reduces coupling between components,… Read More »