Viewing profile — wduquette

I had at least one Gateway 2000 desktop and several laptops over time. All but the last laptop were lovely machines. The last looked good on paper, but it was thicker and heavier t…

Me, too.

Fair point.

To be clear, I greatly disagree with Clean Code’s notion of what constitutes readable and maintainable code.

Make it work, then make it "clean" (that is, readable and maintainable); then make it fast, and only if measurement indicates that it matters.

Using `switch` is not a better approach if the design allows for outsiders to add their own shapes at a later time. Using `switch` probably is a better approach if the range is sha…

Using the proleptic Gregorian calendar for historical dates is only a problem if you want to compute the day of the week (which those missing days will throw off prior to the adopt…

I stopped reading Eddings because after a while I realized that all of these fun, bantering characters I so enjoyed were (except for Garion, mostly) truly awful people and that I d…

The loss of 3rd places is a big deal; but it seems weird to wax nostalgic over the remarkably brief period that movie rental stores were actually a thing. Blockbuster Video opened …

I was exposed to Z notation in the late 80's, and could not for the life of me see how to apply to my work as a junior programmer. But the distinction the OP makes between Design a…

What GUI would one use with SBCL? Is it cross-platform, Linux/Mac/Windows?

I'm mostly a solo programmer, and I often have to go back and look at code I wrote five, ten, twenty years ago. And every time I do, I give thanks that I used comments to document …

Re: Mr. Martin's agreement, whether he agrees or not is not nearly as important as the impression his book gives and whether your "Clean Code"-reading co-workers agree. I know peop…

On the contrary, language code is what is "authored". The authoring tools are the IDEs, editors, compilers, etc. that we use to produce the executable application.

At least not automatically. From an algorithmic standpoint it seems likely to be undecidable. But let us not look too closely at what was really a throwaway remark.

Kurt Godel says that you are correct.

A stated goal of the API is to have "low ceremony" when reading arbitrary JSON files. I agree the JSON creation API looks pretty clunky, but the parsing API looks fairly simple.

And things I missed the first time through.

We used to call this “middleware”, that which sits between the client and the server.

Fascinating. When I was a kid and was having difficulty with some task, my grandfather would say, "You didn't hold your mouth right." Many years later, I realized that he was talki…

Re: Java classes called "SimpleFoo": that's usually because `Foo` is an abstract class or interface, and `SimpleFoo` is the version you actually use most of the time, unless you ab…

I remember the golden age of dial-up Bulletin Board Systems. I remember the golden age of Usenet. I remember the golden age of blogs. I remember the golden--well, silver--age of Fa…

And then, along with economic bubbles you also get moral panics. Seen a bunch of those in my time as well. It's a similar thing.

Yes, but the term "Bubble" comes from the South Sea Bubble.

Excellent book. The high point for me was the enterprising fellow who set up a stall in London during the South Sea Bubble (the original bubble!), allowing people to invest in "An …