71–80 of 108 posts
http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/07/old-school-developers-achi...
It mentions that Ken Thompson "starts his projects by designing the data structures and then works bottom up".
Adapting this approach solved several problems I was having during development.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"This is approximately the same reason as why I start out writing most of my programs by creating a bunch of types, and why I find dynamic programming languages uncomfortable to use." Classes. There are your types. Python has them. Ruby has them. Javascript has them. . . .
If you can't see see the qualitative difference between algebraic data types and Javascript classes, there's no point discussing things.
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs A 1976 book written by Niklaus Wirth, designer of Pascal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithms_%2B_Data_Structures_...
This brings up a burning question that I have been pondering for a while. I still don't get how to properly design good APIs. I have been programming but as a scientific research not as a professional developer, and I have found I cannot remember how to use my code a day after writing that code. Take my current project as an example. I have some samples, each of which are observations along a sequence of non-overlapp…
Eric Evans wrote a big book called Domain-Driven Design about these things, but his advice basically boils down to this.
Absolutely right. I was lucky enough to learn this in college. Although, I did not learn it from the CS professors but rather my physics prof. He was a champion for a language called APL and he actually cut a deal with the CS department to accept credits for taking an APL class he was teaching as a substitute for the FORTRAN class. APL was an amazing mind-opening experience. Throughout the APL 101 and 102 courses he…
Being able to have a red black factory is rather nice. Although it does mean we now need to think carefully about what factory we shall need before even starting. And accepting occasionally moving the while factory three blocks over, during prodction
Absolutely right. I was lucky enough to learn this in college. Although, I did not learn it from the CS professors but rather my physics prof. He was a champion for a language called APL and he actually cut a deal with the CS department to accept credits for taking an APL class he was teaching as a substitute for the FORTRAN class. APL was an amazing mind-opening experience. Throughout the APL 101 and 102 courses he…
Being able to have a red black factory is rather nice. Although it does mean we now need to think carefully about what factory we shall need before even starting. And accepting occasionally moving the while factory three blocks over, during prodction
Absolutely right. I was lucky enough to learn this in college. Although, I did not learn it from the CS professors but rather my physics prof. He was a champion for a language called APL and he actually cut a deal with the CS department to accept credits for taking an APL class he was teaching as a substitute for the FORTRAN class. APL was an amazing mind-opening experience. Throughout the APL 101 and 102 courses he…
If you follow this line of thinking far enough, you realize that computer programming is just applied analytic philosophy. You have your metamodel (logic/programming language) and then you build your model (ontology/software).
I really like your assembly line metaphor. Knowing that a "customer" has a name and email address is almost of no importance compared to understanding how the "customer" information arrives, the actions around the "customer," and the end result of the actions. That's the assembly line.
I believe Rich Hickey believes in keeping data really simple and writing the code around that. Could someone explain this philosophy to me?
This brings up a burning question that I have been pondering for a while. I still don't get how to properly design good APIs. I have been programming but as a scientific research not as a professional developer, and I have found I cannot remember how to use my code a day after writing that code. Take my current project as an example. I have some samples, each of which are observations along a sequence of non-overlapp…
Hi, I used to have a similar problem: seeing that when I do architectures they become difficult to maintain. Or difficult to talk about, to be honest, I don't understand your second paragraph :) What really helped me is the approach to program API-driven. Don't start with your algorithms but start with what kind of functions you probably need and what would be the easiest way to use them. (In fact this is not so far…
This brings up a burning question that I have been pondering for a while. I still don't get how to properly design good APIs. I have been programming but as a scientific research not as a professional developer, and I have found I cannot remember how to use my code a day after writing that code. Take my current project as an example. I have some samples, each of which are observations along a sequence of non-overlapp…
How do you name things? From your text ("I have a segment defined as a pair of start and end position plus its observation , a sample as a vector of segments, and all samples as a dictionary of samples") it seems you have a lot of different names for different things. Decide what names are important and which ones aren't (the "vector" and "dictionary" probably aren't). Eric Evans wrote a big book called Domain-Driven…