
Back to Basics (2001) - ElectronShak
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/
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vmurthy
I think one big issue is that professors certainly don't care to explain how a
certain building-block really affects something in the real world. For e.g. as
Joel explains, how having all rows in a DB as fixed length dramatically
improves performance vis-a-vis XML (because .. you know CPU operations :-) )
really will get students think through the strategy of "Oooo!Shiny! Let me use
this" prevalent in lots of companies.

~~~
dplgk
E.g. Let's use Mongo!

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marcosdumay
> You’ve built a marvelous palace but the foundation is a mess. Instead of a
> nice cement slab, you’ve got rubble down there. So the palace looks nice but
> occasionally the bathtub slides across the bathroom floor and you have no
> idea what’s going on.

That's how web development feels nowadays (it wasn't how it feel by then), and
I fear we are moving more and more on that direction for every end-user
software.

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mrkeen
Joel certainly makes string-concatenation look difficult in C.

Maybe a couple of things to add:

1) It's surprisingly easy to carry around the size of strings next to the
string. Then when you do a string concat like this, you can just add up the
integer amounts and you know how much to allocate.

2) While it is harder to do this kind of ad-hoc string manipulation in C than
in higher-level languages, it's worth noting that "the C way" is also "the
disk way". Whatever string-copying function you write in C will likely _just
work_ for files too, whereas in a higher-level language you'll probably assume
your Strings are in RAM, and then write some more code to instantiate a
BufferedWhatever to copy your RAM Strings onto disk.

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pgl
(2001)

