I love hypothetical questions. Got a bunch recently. I guess it's the season for hypotheticals.
These all seem to come from the "Averted Glance" school of management. The best part about the "I don't want to know the details" management is that we need to substitute metrics for understanding. One …
more ...In general, Software Engineering Metrics are not without value.
Expecting magic from metrics is what devalues them, reducing metrics to dumb numerosity.
Once code is in production, plenty of metrics are readily available. For example, the trouble-ticket history tells you everything you need to know about code that's in production …
more ...I've (finally) updated the pyWeb Literate Programming Tool.
There were feature requests and bug reports. Much to do. Sadly, I'm really slow at doing it.
Check out this item on eWeek: Java, C, C++: Top Programming Languages for 2011 - Application Development - News & Reviews - eWeek.com.
The presentation starts with Java, C, C++, C# -- not surprising. These are clearly the most popular programming languages. These seem to be the first choice made by many organizations.
In …
more ...Check this out: http://www.antiifcampaign.com/.
I'm totally in favor of reducing complexity. I've seen too many places where a Strategy or some other kind of Delegation design pattern should have been used. Instead a cluster of if-statements was used. Sometimes these if-statements suffer copy-and-paste repetition because someone didn't …
more ...Check this out: "Stupid Template Languages".
Love this:
"The biggest annoyance I have with smart template languages (Mako, Genshi, Jinja2, PHP, Perl, ColdFusion, etc) is that you have the capability to mix core business logic with your end views, hence violating the rules of Model-View-Controller architecture."
Yes, too much power …
more ...Imagine that we've got a collection of applications used by customers to provide data, a collection of applications we use to collect data from vendors. We've got a third collection of analytical tools.
Currently, they share a common database, but the focus, use cases, and interfaces are different.
Okay so …
more ...First, read EWD800.
It has harsh things to say about relying on intuition in programming.
Stack Overflow is full of questions where someone takes their experience with one language and applies it incorrectly and inappropriately to another language.
I get email, periodically, also on this subject. I got one recently …
more ...ComputerWorld, November 22, 2010, has this: "Open Source Grows Up". The news of the weird is "It's clear that open-source software has moved beyond the zealotry phase." I wasn't aware this phase existed. I hope to see the project plan with "zealotry" in it.
The real news is "More than …
more ...Half the fun on Stack Overflow is the endless use of closed-ended questions. "Can I do this in Python?" being so common and so hilarious.
The answer is "Yes." You can do it.
Perhaps that's not the question they really meant to ask.
See "Open versus Closed Ended Questions" for …
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