As I said in my last post, many of the language communities that I interact with now are fond of asserting that their particular community does a wonderful job of testing, documentation, or both. This time, I’d like to examine the claims on documentation. Once upon a time, all of the documentation for a language… Read More »
Many of the language communities that I interact with now are fond of asserting that their particular community does a wonderful job of testing, documentation, or both. Most languages come with very good testing frameworks, and have libraries (or modules, gems, or crates) for even more. (Going forward I’m just going to use the term… Read More »
This is yet another in the Best Practices Gone Bad series of posts. Around two decades ago, the book Design Patterns (often called the Gang of Four, or GoF, book) was published. This book introduced a large number of programmers to a new approach to thinking about solutions. For those who are not familiar with… 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 »
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 »
A couple of years ago, I wrote a set of three essays on Resource Management: The Semantics of Garbage Collection, More Thoughts on Resource Recovery, and Other Resource Recovery Approaches. In summary, my argument in these articles was that the standard mark-and-sweep garbage collection falls down for two major reasons, it doesn’t deal with any… Read More »
As I said in Joel on Wrong-Looking Code, I find Joel on Software to be a good source of information on programming. However, I don’t always agree with him. In Joel on Software – Making Wrong Code Look Wrong, Joel states that he does not like exceptions. He also refers to a previous article Joel… Read More »
I find that I have a different viewpoint about programming languages than many programmers I’ve met. I feel that a programming language embodies three different things: a tool for solving problems an approach to thinking about solutions a notation I don’t believe that there is any language that is the best or most powerful in… Read More »
In The Architecture of Participation vesus(sic) Hacking, Carlos Perez argues against points he sees in the essay Great Hackers by Paul Graham. Having read the two essays, I find Perez’s comments enlightening, but maybe not in the way he intended. I found things in both essays that I agree with, and things in both that… Read More »
In The Semantics of Garbage Collection, I explained why I don’t like the term garbage collection. I also introduced the term resource recovery, and suggested that this change in naming could generate a useful change in viewpoint. Many programmers have been indoctrinated with the belief that garbage collection is the solution to all memory problems,… Read More »