Programming

I got my first computer in 1984. It was a Commodore 64. I had to do extra chores and save up my allowance to buy it. I was 13. Back then, Sears and other retail stores had Commodore 64 computers out on display. Whenever I went to the store, I’d write a short BASIC program and leave it running on the display computers: 10 PRINT "CRAIG IS GREAT!" 20 GOTO 10 Hey, I was a 13-year-old kid. Later, I got a little more sophisticated. I’d change the background color instead. I still remember the POKE address: ...

I’ve started working on my own framework in Ruby in the past couple days. It’s built upon my recent work at understanding Uncle Bob’s Ruby Midwest 2011 talk, and his article on Clean Architecture, and the resulting hexagonal architecture (AKA ports and adapters). Somehow my research in that vein led me to Gary Bernhardt’s Boundaries talk. I’ve read a lot about the talk, and knew about the idea of “functional core / imperative shell”. And I’ve worked with a lot of similar ideas lately. But I believe this is the first time that I actually watched the whole video. ...

There’s a tweet that I saw recently, with some simple advice for novice programmers: Slow down. This is probably good advice for most programmers. Our team recently noticed that every time we try to rush things, we make mistakes. And the mistakes end up costing us more time than if we had just done things at our normal pace. Slowing down ensures that you do things right, and when you do things right, you end up with a higher-quality product. ...

I’ve been using Python at work for the past few months. I learned Python back in the early 2000s, but never used it for any large projects. I learned Ruby in late 2005, and it quickly became my language of choice for most cases. So while I still prefer Ruby, and will likely use Ruby more in the future than Python, I wanted to assess the strengths and weaknesses of Python in relation to Ruby. Perhaps some of the lessons could be applied when writing Ruby, and it could help to decide when to use each. Also, I’m interested in programming language design, and wanted to document pros and cons in that light. ...

I’ve been more interested in programming patterns lately, partly due to the Ruby community’s recent interest — especially the Ruby Rogue podcast’s love affair with “Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns”. I consider most of the patterns in “Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns” to be patterns “in the small” — things that are typically employed on a single line or method. The Gang Of Four patterns are more medium sized, dealing with methods and classes. The PEAA book covers architectural-scale patterns. I suppose “The Pragmatic Programmer” and similar books could (should!) be considered to be very general patterns, mostly about the practice of programming. ...

Amos and I got in a heated discussion recently on whether we should write a single line comment to better explain some code. (The code in question was Amos’s very elegant solution to testing whether a job got sent to Resque.) Amos doesn’t believe in writing comments much at all. He thinks that if you’re writing a comment, it means that you’re doing something wrong, and that you probably need to write the code more clearly. ...