

Is he right? ( Confessions of a Terrible Programmer ) - vlad
http://kickin-the-darkness.blogspot.com/2007/09/confessions-of-terrible-programmer.html

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byrneseyeview
"If I get to pick the programming language for a particular program, my "go
to" language is Ada."

Your "go to" is considered harmful.

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hhm
This one is very good... I found the only way to get higher in life, in
profession, in anything, is to acknowledge the own limitations. Whenever the
time comes that you start feeling you are really good, you are getting worse
instead: as to be really good, you need to get even better, and you can only
do that if you are humble enough to recognize your own leaks.

And it doesn't care if you are Einstein or Mozart... the battle for skills
isn't against other people, but against nature. Einstein needed to get always
better to understand more of the nature, and the same for Mozart and his
music.

At least, that's the way I see it.

Sorry for my primitive English :)

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lst
BTW, it's one of the most useful tricks in philosophy to always mime the
ignorant (which is, absolutely speaking, always more true than the
opposite...).

It's the trick to grow in wisdom every time you discuss with any other person.

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palish
Whoa. Staring at that site's text for a couple minutes then switching back to
News.YC produces an interesting series of horizontal lines.

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whacked_new
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage>

Bright on dark really strains my eyes... at least when I'm not in a dark room.

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BrandonM
Just the opposite for me... I really prefer light on dark, because I prefer to
not be staring into a lightbulb.

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oditogre
I like light on dark, as you say, but not bright on dark, as whacked said.
Light gray or grayish blue / green on on black or dark, dark red is my
preferred. I keep a .txt on my desktop with html in it to make font exactly
how I like it. On sites that have bad colors, I just paste the text in between
the innermost tags in the .txt, save as 'blah.html', and read at ease. :)

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Tichy
I am skeptical about the assertions stuff. I rather write my methods so that
they don't blow up if they are being called with wrong data. Throwing an
Exception is OK. I can't recall a case where assertions where really
necessary. In fact it seems messy to me to write a method but then to add
instructions for humans of the form "but don't call it with parameters like
that". It should all be in the code, not in the instructions.

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allenbrunson
i disagree. if my code is being called with incorrect parameters, i WANT it to
blow up. if a method silently fixes input data to something it can deal with,
then it's hiding a bug that needs to be fixed.

also, assertions are good documentation. they let maintenance programmers a
better idea of what's expected at this point.

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Tichy
Mabye I never needed them much because I have mostly been using Java, which
has things like NullPointerException. So no need to write an assertion for
that special case. By blow up I meant do something bad, not fail in a noisy
way. That would be the exception.

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darkclark
Unit tests are the way to separate assertions from your implementation code to
avoid messiness.

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henning
It sounds like this guy would like Standard ML and OCaml. Maybe F#?

