Vendetta

Yesterday, my boss noticed that I have already (6 months into the job) accumulated at least a years' worth of future work in trac tickets under my name. And he helpfully suggested maybe we could reassign a few to someone else. So I helped with the triage, right up until we got to #178. He suggested we give it to Mr. Black, and at that moment my head started spinning around, green foam spraying out of my nose and mouth (this was over IM; I used the old-fashioned emoticon *@#$*$@#*%! to convey my feelings).

"THAT ONE'S MINE!" was the best I could do to justify my response.

When perl is too fast

The idea for this post has been brewing for a few months, but I was inspired by this post from David MacIver to get on it.

I like Perl. From a trendiness standpoint this falls somewhere between admitting that I like peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwiches and admitting that I like clubbing baby seals. I understand and can appreciate the common complaints: the language is too big, its syntax is baroque, it is write-only, TMTOWTDI is a bug rather than a feature. But I want to talk about something else that has been irking me.

Code Review: MySQLDAO.java

(DRY, bottom-up programming)

The Code

Today's review is of a Java class called MySQLDAO.java:

Code Review: Constants.pm

(cohesion, scope, laziness)

The Code

Today I took home a chunk of code to review. It's a chunk of code which I've run across, in one form or another, for 10 years now, and it drives me around the bend. In Perl: Constants.pm. In Java: Constants.java. In C/C++: constants.h.

Let's have a look at the perl module KitchenSink/Constants.pm:

tactics, tactics, tactics

One of the challenges for professional programmers trying to advance professionally is simply deciding what to study. We each have a limited amount of time to invest in improving our skills. Should we spend those hours reading about architecture? Computing theory? Lambda calculus? Discrete mathematics? Complexity theory? Compilers? Should we get involved in local user groups, or toy around with new programming languages? Join the IEEE Computer Society? It's easy to find folks who will advocate any of those, and they're probably all correct, in the sense that any of those things help. But we can't study everything, so what is the best place to focus our limited time?

Well, I think I have an answer. But first, a detour into chess.