In your search for achieving excellence in creating software you might have come across one of these statements that ‘code is an art’ or something in that fashion. Although these statements are very appealing, I believe it not to be true. I will explain why. First let’s start with the reasons why a computer programmer (or coder) is considered an artist and it’s product (code) art. Writing code is labour intensive and various attempts have been made to automise the coding process through the use of high-level visual languages or application-generator tools.
One of the most overlooked aspects in any software project is the end-user (e.u.) documentation. Can you recall how many (web)applications you have encountered that had proper e.u. documentation in it? I for one cannot, even though the (web)applications are getting more sophisticated and more complex every day. And to be honest, the software projects I create often lack proper documentation as well. So why is this the case? There are a number of reasons that I can think of:
Ah, so finally Microsoft has also taken the road towards the Model-View- Controller pattern. Scott Guthrie talks about it in his weblog. It was a matter of time ofcourse after the self- proclaimed success of Ruby-On-Rails and the popularity of unit testing. One of the most important motivations that Scott mentions in his articles are ‘seperation of concerns’ and ‘designed for testability’. Let’s take a look at these two: Seperation of concerns.
A small wave has hit the developer community this weekend about a clash between two lead developers: Chris Wilson of Microsoft’s IE team and and Brendan Eich of the Mozilla foundation. The dispute is about the acceptance of ECMAScript 4; the proposed successor of Javascript. Wilson wrote public doubts about this standard, which let Eich to write a public letter in which Microsoft is being blamed for being reluctant and passive in the development of ECMA4.
Ik heb onlangs een boek gelezen van Daniel Gilbert. Daniel Gilbert is hoogleraar op Harvard en legt uit waarom het toch is dat we zoveel moeite hebben om gelukkig te zijn. Dit is niet het zoveelste zelf-hulp boek, waarvan er zoveel van zijn dat je je afvraagt waarom we niet allemaal gelukkig zijn ondertussen. Nee, het gaat juist om die vraag waarom al die zelfhulpboeken zo weinig uithalen. Hij rafelt op een leuke manier de menselijke psyche op het gebied van geluk uiteen.
