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Marc Clifton wrote: For anything but small scale projects, duck-typed languages are absolutely the wrong choice, and at this point, I'd rather be flipping hamburgers than writing flippin' unit tests to verify something the IDE can tell me I did wrong when I use a strongly typed language.
Or we can use F# with its strong type inference on steroids.
Kevin
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I generally struggle to read "Uncle Bob's" screed with an open-mind; for my tastes, there's such an evangelical, almost messianic, and self-promoting, flavor to his style that my automatic the-one-and-only-one-truth shields go up.
In this article, I really don't think the global characterization of programming across a few decades falls as neatly into a SmallTalky-and-ducky-typish and strong-typish-Pascaly-Cish dichotomy as the author describes.
No mention of Lisp, Algol, Modula, Ada, Simula, Cobol, and, given the author's emphasis on the joys of assembler, I'm surprised he didn't mention the programming language Forth (which was also, imho, like TDD is for Uncle Bob, a "religion"). How about the work at Xerox Parc on languages like Sail ? Alan Kay's work ? BASIC ?
One important reason for Pascal's relative success, during its "time," was the fact that academic computer science programs at top-tier universities and colleges tended to use it. I once took lecture notes for a lecture note-taking service at UC Berkeley for Doug Cooper's Pascal course: Cooper, and co-author Mike Clancy, had a best-selling book, "Oh! Pascal!" widely used in college introductory programming courses. The students were doing their homework on mainframes, from terminals ... yeah, this was 1981, or so.
I share (what I perceive as) the skepticism expressed by Marc Clifton on this thread about "total code coverage," and the future as "belonging to" duck-typed languages.
As to my opinion on TDD, Agile, Waterfall, Kanban, etc. ... well, I haven't really looked deeply into any of them. But, yeah, I can't see developing, particularly in the prototyping phase, without constant testing. Now "SOLID:" that seems to me to be where the "meat" is, and that's where I'm investing my get-better-brain resources at the moment.
I disclaimer what I've expressed here by noting that I write from a perspective of being a solo developer enjoying a con$traint free self-employed context in which I can pursue what I want to pursue, which is, at this time, often "academic."
Should the Fates somehow move me to become a part of a development team, then I would expect, and look forward to, some over-arching software management discipline ... hopefully one that does not involve frequent meetings ... remember Joel Spolsky's comments on meetings [^] ... [^] ... Eric Lippert's ... well, can't find the quote from Eric I was looking for.
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
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BillWoodruff wrote: How about the work at Xerox Parc on languages like Sail ?
Dang, I'm impressed. I used SAIL to program a robotic arm to move chess pieces. Was my first introduction to concurrent programming, I loved it so much I wrote a "wedge" for the Commodore PET BASIC to create co-subroutines, complete with software-based context switching to simulate threading. Fun times!
Marc
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Marc, methinks we had the curse, and blessing, of living in "interesting times," and, then, coming out of those times with, evidently, our intellect, curiosity, and passion for the Goddess Techne, alive-and-well.
One of my favorite memories is the day when, still a newcomer at Adobe, I had John Warnock and Chuck Geschke visit my office for a demo of an object-oriented mvc prototype I did in PostScript on the NeXT machine (while working at Emerald City Software, which was then acquired by Adobe). I named this folly "Toto," and gave it the slogan: "We're not in Kansas anymore" I soon learned that I was one of the very few programmers at Adobe who actually liked PostScript qua programming language.
cheers, Bill
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
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Kent Sharkey wrote: A nice read on data types, if that's your type of thing
I like all types as long as they have large fonts.
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If you’re an organization with vast amounts of infrequently accessed storage, typically measured in the hundreds of terabytes, then Microsoft’s Azure hasn’t always been the most economical. Cool Blob Storage: for data that tastes like Ranch dressing
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A Supreme Court rule change will greatly expand the FBI's hacking capability, civil liberties groups have warned. "We are a fact-gathering organization only. We don’t clear anybody. We don’t condemn anybody."
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I'm not sure that I will allow them to do so...court ruling or not...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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Software developers, especially those who are new to the field, often ask this question or at least wonder whether they are good developers or just good at googling up solutions. Seemingly more than some of the users in Q&A
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VR Karthikeyan
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Yes...
1. Also experienced programmers learn...
2. To be experienced programmer doesn't mean you know the exact syntax of every method of every class of every language you ever worked with
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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I strongly agree.
VR Karthikeyan
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Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote: To be experienced programmer doesn't mean you know the exact syntax of every method of every class of every language you ever worked with But it does mean you know how to find it!
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And more importantly, how to use what you find!
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My father always said...
Experience is not making you smater, it makes easier to know where to find what you need.
And in Germany it is said:
You can be dumb, as long as you know how to help yourself.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Szent-Györgyi Albert (a Nobel prize owner) one had an interview in his library-room and the interviewer told, that for sure he is so smart because he read all those books...Hes response was, that to be smart is not to know the content of those books, but to find the right book for the current question in the library...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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PowerApps allows employees to build business-focused apps without knowing how to program Just so you know what programs you'll be fixing next year
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For the last 30 years, they've been trying to come up with a way to remove programmers from the software loop. It has always failed, and it will always fail.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
- You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
- When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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The statistics for April reveal that, at long last, Windows 7 is no longer installed on the majority of computers, slipping to a 48.79 percent market share. Windows 10 saw slight growth to 14.35 percent (up from 14.15 percent), and Windows XP dropped below 9.66 percent. "NetMarketShare reports that Windows Vista is installed on almost as many computers as Linux" (ouch)
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In an illuminating Twitter conversation, Apple's Phil Schiller says you should never pluralize Apple product names. So, it should be WePhone? IsePhone? (For our friends in Newfoundland. And Labrador.)
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Intel is refocusing on 'products that deliver higher returns.' So then can focus on chips for the shrinking PC market?
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Kent Sharkey wrote: So then can focus on chips for the shrinking PC market?
What about those "cloud" based cpus ... you know the stuff that used to be called "servers"?
Just guessing here, but aren't they having to increase in number as more people keep falling for this "everything on cloud" idea?
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