The top 9+7 things every programmer or architect should now

http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/07/top-97-things-every-programmer-or.html

by kioub • 15 years ago

10 6 15 years ago

cycojesus• 15 years ago

it's "know" with a K.

1. I understand this as "don't wait for perfection before committing", not "try to improve every code you checkout". If I have no good reason to touch some code I won't, even if it looks ugly (and I'll be dealing with some horrendous things in the coming months.)

2. Simple code is boring. Boring can be good. Code that I find beautiful is more clever than simple (as in, after that "AHA!" moment the cleverness appears that would have required tons more simple code when here these 2 lines do the same.) I find

    foo = ( bar ) ? bla : bli;

much more beautiful than

    if ( bar) {
        foo = bla
    } else {
        foo = bli
    }

troels2• 15 years ago

I kind of prefer

    foo = bar ? bla : bli;

troels2• 15 years ago

I see your #4 (Performance) and raise you one "premature optimization is the root of all evil" -- Donald Knuth

asymptotic• 15 years ago

I'll see your out-of-context quote and raise you the more subtle, sensible, and actually correct quote from Donald Knuth.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/39/whats-your...

        There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers
    waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed
    of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency
    actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are
    considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of
    the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

    Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good
    programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be
    wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been
    identified. It is often a mistake to make a priori judgments about what parts
    of a program are really critical, since the universal experience of
    programmers who have been using measurement tools has been that their
    intuitive guesses fail. (…)

kioub• 15 years ago

Thank you all for your comments! I am sorry for the "now" typo ... its obviously know!

BRs

rs• 15 years ago

The book that was reviewed is here: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596809485/

The top 9+7 things every programmer or architect should now

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