Ramblings

The Pragmatic Programmers have proposed that developers learn a language a year.  I agree that it’s very important to keep abreast of changes in IT and that by learning new languages we can keep our minds sharp and bring new ways of doing things into old languages.  However, I have to wonder if this learning [...]

Today’s thought for the day from A Word A Day is:
Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
-Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)
This struck me as being very much the idea behind defensive programming.  Because we don’t know what sort of events life will throw at a programme, we need for it to be robust [...]

One of the manifestos from ChangeThis this month is about Mini Sagas.  The author, Rajesh Setty presents the idea that writing mini sagas, which contain exactly 50 words, expands your creativity — following on the idea that Creativity Loves Constraints. Typically the mini saga expresses some sort of message or value — I think in [...]

“If a thing can be done adequately by means of one, it is superfluous to do it by means of several; for we observe that nature does not employ two instruments where one suffices.” — Thomas Aquinas
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” — Leonardo DaVinci
A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a [...]

I’ve been giving a lot of thought over the past months to the idea of “Just Enough Programming”.  Agile manufacturing has led to Just In Time manufacturing.  We also have Just In Time compilers.  But I’ve seen far too many times where application architectures have been far too complex — where things are done, not [...]