Maybe it’s a reflection of when I started programming, but I’ve always had problems with frameworks. I prefer having a sharp set of tools to having a do everything framework. For me, the framework breaks down if I need to do something that does not match exactly what the framework designers wanted to do. A… Read More »
Several times in the last few years, I have written about the subject of memory management, garbage collection, and object lifetime. Some of essays I’ve written on this subject include: The Semantics of Garbage Collection More Thoughts on Resource Recovery Other Resource Recovery Approaches Resource Management Revisited Recently, I was thinking about this issue again… Read More »
Ever since O’Reilly published the new book Beautiful Code, there seem to be references everywhere to what makes code beautiful. While a few people have suggested that beauty should not influence code (see the comments section for the suggestion that there is no beautiful code), I believe that most people have seen code that they… Read More »
Several newer languages (as in less than 10 years old) have been designed around the idea that everything is an object. Since I started programming professionally almost two decades ago, I was programming before the object craze became mainstream. I have done the OO thing for over a decade and am not as impressed as… Read More »
I ran across an unusual article a couple of months ago, Ethical Software by Alex Bunardzic » Right Tool for the Job is a Myth. My first thought was that the author must be out of his mind. After some reflection, I have a somewhat different view. Now I just think he is mistaken. I… Read More »
Recently, Joel Spolsky wrote about Don Norman’s article Simplicity Is Highly Overrated. Joel used this as a springboard to another talk of how simplicity doesn’t matter in Joel on Software: Simplicity. He referenced and expanded on his views from Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth. As I’ve said before, I often find Joel’s… Read More »
I have recently being seeing references online to the concept of Technical Debt. The concept is an attempt to explain to business and management types some of the downside of overly complicated designs, lack of testing infrastructure, and quick-and-dirty code written to meet a deadline. In the past, I’ve had trouble explaining the difficulties working… Read More »
One of the things Java programmers seem to really like to hate in C++ is the concept of operator overloading. I have heard this from many Java programmers and seen it written by others. According to many, operator overloading makes C++ impossible to understand because you can’t tell what a piece of code is doing… Read More »
In the book Software Exorcism, Bill Blunden described a problem caused by the maintenance programmer not usually being the same person as the programmer who wrote the code. Often the maintenance programmer comes in with a less-than-complete understanding of the original problem or of the design decisions made for this problem. Usually, there are also… Read More »
I’ve been seeing a lot of comments in various forums similar to this comment by Christopher Diggins: XML down a slippery slope. In most of them, there is the implied belief that XML is the solution to all problems and that anything that violates the spirit of XML is to be condemned. I have personally… Read More »