Comments for Koans of code

Comment on Boo by @r13f

@r13f — Wed, 12 May 2010 08:59:47 +0000

How about the documentation, i couldnt find any good reference about this language. It would be hard to learn new language with limited reference. I dont need to have msdn like reference, but at least there is one small chm file like in python or php maybe.

Comment on In by Chuan Li

Chuan Li — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 09:54:26 +0000

You should avoid public static method if:

- that is part of public interface
- that public interface is a part of fundamental service
- any slightest chance that you might interchange the service’s implementation

For our own sake, think in term of evolving software, try to use interface whenever possible.

Comment on In by Colin

Colin — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:48:03 +0000

Yeah, I know this post is old so don’t state the obvious but what about stateless design? Whats the point of creating an object instance if it holds no state?

This can happen if you design along the idea of only ever holding state against a database and pulling it in whenever you require the data!?

Comment on In by matt

matt — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:25:55 +0000

static methods are only “good” if you /are/ (ie you are coding) the framework.

even then, unless they are one line of code you better be sure it works when you write that framework of yours because you’ll be picking the bugs out of it for weeks: unit testing is almost impossible on a static method.

Comment on Garbage by Tomo

Tomo — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 10:43:11 +0000

Consider yourself lucky.

I seriously think writing a compiler should be included in curriculum of any Computer Science school. Not because world needs more compilers but because writing a compiler from scratch helps you grasp most of what’s difficult in programming. Pointers, DSLs, GC, I could go on and on.

Unfortunately most schools here (Poland) do not require actually writing a compiler. Some don’t even offer courses on that, some teach only theory… Sigh…

Comment on Garbage by James

James — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 01:03:36 +0000

Not sure where your interns come from, but most decent computer science courses should cover these types of issues. I am a recent Australian CS graduate and we learned all about garbage collection strategies and other behind-the-scenes stuff. Off the top of my head, we also covered process management (we implement our own process manager which had to allow a choice of various selection strategies and measure execution times), and we also created our own compiler which had to parse a particular made-up language with meaningful error messages and convert the structure to a flat machine code. I agree that much abstraction is occurring. I am now a java developer, and hence worry less about memory management than would a C++ developer in my position 10 years ago, but I also probably develop application for a much larger scale (hope that makes sense), so the abstraction is neccessary. Having said that though, I do feel I understand what’s going on behind the scenes, and have several times had to profile an app or diagnose a resource leak which has required me to think about those behind-the-scenes issues. Maybe your interns have done a course that is very focused on data representation and business rules etc (like Information Science) and have had less exposure to low level stuff in order to get more exposure to the high-level stuff.

Comment on Garbage by Tomo

Tomo — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:48:43 +0000

Well, do you have any experience with interns? That’s exactly what they do. Ask anything regarding “how things work” and all you get are blank stares.

That leaves all the fun work for us, the smart guys. And the money

BTW, I can name maybe 3 people who studied with me who knew anything about such esoteric things as GC or guts of a compiler. I don’t think students are worse now then when we were ones.

Comment on Garbage by Emiel Regis

Emiel Regis — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:24:57 +0000

I would argue that complete ignorance on what is going on behind the scenes of a GC or a scaling framework is a bad thing. I agree that as long as one is building more-less average, not very demanding applications, that knowledge is redundant and hand-crafting things will not pay off. However, as you noticed, there are cases when it is a must. I think it is OK to forget details if one does not need them. But if you are saying that most of future Java developers know next to nothing about how GC works, I consider it an educational failure. What else should software developers study at university if not how things work? Should they learn how to use APIs, what one can immediately check in the documentation? I don’t think so:)

Comment on My by disnomia

disnomia — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 16:11:47 +0000

Is one very nice app for pys60 and will be more perfect when you will add all the above option that you mentioned.
Thanks for sharing!!

Comment on import by Tomo

Tomo — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 05:49:57 +0000

Some day I will.