41–50 of 53 posts
Mine is I don't believe single-entry single-exit should be law. It tends to clutter your code with extra braces.
It's 2010 and we're still running a lot of native code with no OS-enforced sanity checks on pointer arithmetic or types or capability tokens. "Crash" and "boot" are "virus" are phenomena the general public have become familiar with. Someday we're going to look back on all this as grotesquely stupid, even negligent. (But I can't see a path from here to there. Especially one that involves getting paid to write an OS wo…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system) .
There's too much fragmentation among programming languages. For instance, I think Ruby, Python, Perl and PHP all solve the same set of problems. One must win for the greater good. The benefits of unifying the developer community outweigh the benefits of diversity. There I said it :)
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…
Just wait until you need to actually write an automation test and dealt with code/developers who happen to say "well, it's hard to do that now since we have tightly written code".
Ship sinking from that point onward.
Mine is I don't believe single-entry single-exit should be law. It tends to clutter your code with extra braces.
How is this controversial? Anybody who's had to sanity-check function arguments (e.g. null pointer checking) knows that having multiple exits from a function is sometimes the Right Thing.
It's 2010 and we're still running a lot of native code with no OS-enforced sanity checks on pointer arithmetic or types or capability tokens. "Crash" and "boot" are "virus" are phenomena the general public have become familiar with. Someday we're going to look back on all this as grotesquely stupid, even negligent. (But I can't see a path from here to there. Especially one that involves getting paid to write an OS wo…
You might find Microsoft Research's Singularity project of interest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system) http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/ See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system) .
There's been a lot of this stuff happening around. There are many paths - which unfortunately cannot include many of the existing native (unsafe) solutions.
That almost no one really knows what they're doing.
What I mean is that as an industry, we're in the stone ages. What we're doing will be looked back upon the same way that look back at bloodletting that was practiced by doctors a few hundred years ago.
Just when I think I'm beginning to get a grip on things, a whole new layer opens up, and I start over as a beginner again. I've heard anecdotal evidence that programmers who have been around 30 or 40 years still experience this.
That almost no one really knows what they're doing.
EDIT: Not to be all self-promotey, just more of a "I agree with you so much I wrote about it."
Many companies aren't going to need educated software engineers anymore because more and more software apps and code are given out for free. They will still need developers to make custom changes, but at less pay and less education (think mechanic instead of engineer). It will make it that much easer to outsource your job to India.
I have already seen this happening.
The top items don't seem to be very controversial, but instead seem to be "things that good programmers think are true, and bad ones don't." Here's mine: if you haven't gone through a respectable 4 year CS program, odds are I'm not going to want to hire you since your brain isn't wired to think about algorithms and data structures instead of code and servers.
Surely there's a more direct way to determine how someone's brain is wired? Have a conversation with them about some algorithm or data structure. A four-year CS program is definitely not the only way to learn that sort of thing.