21–30 of 53 posts
Avoiding geeks who have too many opinions
Maybe that's not the same thing as "too many" opinions; like when people have opinions on something they have no experience with.
I've always preferred it when people have strong, but weakly held opinions. [1]
[1] http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/strong_opinio...
I rather like these two: http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html I find OOP technically unsound. ... I find OOP philosophically unsound. ... I find OOP methodologically wrong. ... http://www.infoq.com/presentations/The-DCI-Architecture (at around 39:30) You cannot do object-oriented programming in Java. What the first calls OOP, the second calls "class-oriented programming". What the second calls proper OOP…
in my opinion, writing unit tests is overrated. i think some developers put too much stock in unit testing and it gives them (and their managers, customers, and co-workers) a false sense of security. they end up wasting time and not really preventing as many bugs as they think it will. application logic changes and they have to write twice as much code to change the application and all of the tests that depended on t…
I've seen so many programmers start writing so much better code after adding the criterium "it has to be testable".
BTW, the killer bugs are usually not in the "complicated routine". They are more often in the simple things programmers like to think they can do so perfectly that they don't need to write tests for it. I have found many a bug in the most simple one line functions I never bothered to test.
Read http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=48495 for more detail and a back and forth argument on it.
Funny how most of those controversial opinions would be pretty much non controversial on HN.
I am often intrigued by people debating what language should be the first language other dev's learn. It seems as if people argue for the language they picked up first / have most experience in. I believe the correct answer is not a direct answer, but something along the lines of "it doesn't matter, so long as you learn several, well".
I often recommend Python because it enables you to do a lot, quickly, and is easy to read. I learned C first, stopped studying C when I tried to make a GUI for win32. ~2 pages of code for an empty window. ~5 lines in Python. So, the ideal first language is whatever is easy to understand and fast to accomplish something. Instant gratification, in other words.
Should one learn the fundamentals first (assembly/C) or the practical first (python)? The answer will depend from person to person. I personally took the practical first approach.
[1] http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/03/03/just-in-case-versus...
So can we assume that the most highly-voted are actual the least controversial? This is kind of interesting.
It's not often you see comment sections with that dynamic. One is prompted to respond with something that will essentially relegate them to the bottom of the page.
You may choose to support a two-point comment using an upvote, perhaps only to see it voted back down a minute later. Controversy in plain sight?