I spent a lot of years diligently commenting my code. I wrote what the code did next to the statements themselves and I wrote method headers and sometimes I even kept a journal of edits in that header as if there were no such thing as source control. As I mentioned in an earlier post,…
Do you remember being a kid, old enough to think somewhat deductively and logically, but not old enough really to understand how the world works? Do you remember putting together some kind of eloquent argument about why you should be able to sleep at a friend’s house or stay out later than normal, perfecting your…
If I have to write some code that’s going to do something rather complex, it’s easy for my mind to start swimming with possibilities, as mentioned in the magic boxes post. In that post, I talked about thinking in abstractions and breaking problems apart and alluded to TDD being a natural fit for this paradigm…
Queuing Up Some Rage Imagine that you’re talking to an acquaintance, and you mention that blue is your favorite color. The response comes back: Acquaintance: You’re completely wrong. Red is the best color. How does the rest of this conversation go? If you’re sane… Acquaintance: That’s wrong. Red is the best color. You: Uh, okay……
Oracles In Math When I was a freshman in college, I took a class called “Great Theoretical Ideas In Computer Science”, taught by Professor Steven Rudich. It was in this class that I began to understand how fundamentally interwoven math and computer science are and to think of programming as a logical extension of math….
