Programming

The greatest problem in learning object oriented design is in the toy problems. The object oriented solution never looks better than the regular solution. I recently read Head First Design Patterns and redid every pattern in that book in Python. You can see my results at https://github.com/jmcguire/learning/tree/master/design_patterns. Look at the original files and the new files. The new files are always longer, and never easier to grok. The real problem is that the benefits of Object Oriented Design don’t show themselves until you are past toy problems and dealing with real-world applications, but those applications won’t fit in a book or in a paper. ...

Learn the right way to write a program the wrong way In my last post I reviewed a paper by David Parnas. In it he talks about the right way and the wrong way to decompose a program. I’d like to show off how I like to do things, which is the wrong way. It’s a good skill to have, but one that a lot of beginners on Stack Overflow don’t know. ...

It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that New York taxes were managed by a handful of programmers. But most programmers would be scared to learn how much of it was done in Perl.