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 »
Several of the past few essays have focused on the notation aspects of programming languages. The major benefit of a notation is making what you want to say concise without losing it’s power in the process. To use an example from an earlier essay, supporting the use of normal algebraic notation for working with matrices… Read More »
Recently, I’ve been taken with the idea of programming languages as notation. When most people look at a programming language, they see syntax and possibly an underlying paradigm. I see the same, I just find the idea that each language also provides a unique notation for expressing ideas quite appealing. Lately, I’ve been thinking about… Read More »
I recently finished reading Eric Sink on the Business of Software. I had read many of the essays before and, in general, I like what Sink has to say. I’ll freely admit that he knows a lot more about the business of software than I probably ever will, and I’ll normally take his opinion over… Read More »
I probably shouldn’t be, but I’m surprised how often I have heard the statement We can’t do X in our environment… where X is one or more of the following: version control automated testing unit tests design testing object oriented programming bug tracking warning-free compiles In almost every case, the person has claimed to understand… 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 »
I’ve recently finished reading Joel Spolsky’s Joel on Software in book form. In the book, I read the essay Human Task Switches Considered Harmful. As someone who has had a lot of experience with multitasking myself, and a fair amount with computer multi-tasking, I found this claim to be pretty amazing. I have looked at… Read More »
Over the last few years, I’ve been frustrated with the Software Engineering industry. I was actually trained as an engineer, and much of what I see passed off as software engineering is not engineering. I’ve been mulling this over for some time without being able to put my finger on the part that bothers me.… Read More »
The Logic of Failure Dietrich Döner Perseus Books, 1996 This is a spectacular book on why people make mistakes. This book gives wonderful insight into design and troubleshooting that you won’t get from any traditional book on programming. A large portion of the book describes how very intelligent people make what seem like blindingly stupid… Read More »
One of the fundamental laws of the universe could be called the Law of Unintended Consequences. This law is as universal as Murphy’s Law, but not as well recognized. To me, the gut-level understanding of this law is one of the things that shows the difference between a really good programmer and someone who just… Read More »