Posts tagged “programming”
The problem with complex error messages
Whilst I found myself agreeing with most of Jeff Atwood’s post The Problem With Logging, I strongly disagree with his third point: If it’s worth saving to a logfile, it’s worth showing in the user interface. This is the paradox: if the information you’re logging is at all valuable, it deserves to be surfaced in [...]
Real World Lisp
Prompted by a question posed by one of my colleagues today, “has anyone ever used Lisp?”, I surprisingly found myself being the only person that had. I played around with it many years ago after being inspired by Eric S. Raymond’s seminal article, “How to Become A Hacker” in which he explained that “getting” Lisp [...]
Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it
Wise words taken from a list of programming epigrams from 1982: Epigrams on Programming
Singletons and global state
A very useful article from Google’s MiÅ¡ko Hevery about the problems with the Singleton design pattern. Essentially, Singleton’s rely on a global instance variable which could point to any number of other variables, thus creating a global state. This causes problems when you want to test your code. Root Cause of Singletons Top 10 things [...]
“Programmers Wikipedia” Coming Soon
stackoverflow.com is a new project from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, intended to be “the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit”. Worth keeping an eye on…
Creator of ELIZA dies
Joe Weizenbaum, the creator of one of the earliest examples of Artificial Intelligence, has died. Weizenbaum created ELIZA, the “virtual therapist”, which I’ve played around with in various implementations over the years. It inspired me to investigate Lisp, so for that reason alone I hold Weizenbaum in high regard. “A computer will do what you [...]