Thoughtless!

Posted in Semantics with tags , , , , , , , , on September 8, 2010 by moffdub

Greetings once again, readers, programmers, surfers, Googlers, girlfriend, and even the media alike. Welcome to another thrill-packed excursion into OCD-like minutia, fresh off of a week of vacation, which included a harrowing forray into a foreign country, a lawless, colorful swamp.

Today I need to empty my topic garbage with various terms that have been floating around my post queue, just taking up space. Let’s answer some questions.

What is the difference between an environment and a region?

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Code Review 4: Bowling Kata, Erlang edition

Posted in erlang with tags , , , , , on August 25, 2010 by moffdub

Yeah, yeah, I bet you thought that I had slipped into my familiar “I don’t have enough time for this” mumbo bugspit of the hiatus. “Oh, it’s been three weeks since the last time he posted any code, he must’ve stopped.”

False.

Simply put, I had to weather our organization’s usual two-pronged quarterly software release, which involved a fifteen-hour day and two 3 A.M. wake-up calls. On with the code.

I’m not sure where to start. I was going to try to order this code review by the changes I made, but there have been so many, so I’ll just do this by module.

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Helltime For August 23

Posted in Helltime with tags on August 23, 2010 by moffdub

Announcer: Now for quick hits and commentary on software development topics from around the web, the EIP web-ring brings you the stigmatized spawn of a refactory, MoffDub, and Helltime!

  • Watts S. Humphrey of the SEI takes a step back in the July/August issue of CrossTalk and tries to figure out why large software projects almost always fail. The big takeaway for me from this lengthy article is that Watts first says that managers aren’t the problem, but rather the management method: managers like to “Manage By Walking Around”, and this works because they can see, feel, and hear the work being done as it is being done; he goes on to say that because software is different because it is essentially imaginary, these typical techniques do not work, and managers end up sticking their noses where it doesn’t belong and generally pissing everyone off; finally, Watts says that the engineers must manage themselves since they know the work best and can give the most accurate reports and status!

    So who needs managers? I swear, every time I make a joke about those people (managers), it comes true.

  • To see how the new kids on the block are looking at us OO old-timers, take a read at Isaac Hodes’ CopperThoughts blog, where he covers Java for Clojure programmers. Aside from the accurate description of classes in functional terms (“A class is a bundle of methods (functions which act on the class) that can serve as a data type.”), it is interesting to see the syntax Clojure uses for Java methods; it seems that a method name is passed to a function as data, kind of like Smalltalk. It harks back to my playing around in various functional languages to force-fit OO where it didn’t really belong.
  • Dan McComas, web developer for BayCitizen, fears becoming an old web developer because he cannot think of any he has worked with recently. He figures that most of the people that would have been 50+ developers are now managers. Now, he contemplates abandoning the virtuous path of code creation. Don’t do it, Dan. Don’t do it.
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