{"id":79,"date":"2004-04-21T22:26:07","date_gmt":"2004-04-21T22:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8000\/?p=79"},"modified":"2004-04-21T22:26:07","modified_gmt":"2004-04-21T22:26:07","slug":"programming-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/2004\/04\/programming-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"Programming Practice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not quite sure what lead me to this blog entry, but I find <a title=\"PragDave\" href=\"http:\/\/pragprog.com\/pragdave\/Practices\/Kata\">PragDave: Code Kata<\/a> by Dave Thomas to be a very interesting idea. I had never thought of describing coding practice as similar to kata.<\/p>\n<p>I did stumble into a similar idea once many years ago. I had just finished reading <cite>Software Tools<\/cite> by Kernighan and Plauger, when I came to the conclusion that implementing some of the classic Unix text tools from scratch would be a good way to improve my programming. None of the programming problems themselves were particularly hard, but I got the idea that building a clean implementation of each of the tools would help me focus on practical aspects of my programming.<\/p>\n<p>Over the next few months, I built a number of the classic tools. In each case, I worked hard to generate a clean, minimal, and complete implementation of each tool. I went over each piece of code several times to ensure that there was nothing unnecessary or unclear in the code. When I finally declared this experiment finished, I really felt that my coding and design skills had improved dramatically.<\/p>\n<p>I haven&#8217;t thought about that exercise in a number of years. Now that PragDave has reminded me of it, I think I may need to pick a similar project to see if I can help keep those mental muscles in shape.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not quite sure what lead me to this blog entry, but I find PragDave: Code Kata by Dave Thomas to be a very interesting idea. I had never thought of describing coding practice as similar to kata. I did stumble into a similar idea once many years ago. I had just finished reading Software\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/2004\/04\/programming-practice\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[65,184,217,252],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}