I Built His Cage

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!

• Blogoscoped reminds us that good programmers are both dumb and lazy. Philipp Lenssen reports:
  

  Lazy, because only lazy programmers will want to write the kind of tools that might replace them in the end.

  Yeah.

  Second (and I will elaborate a bit more on this because I find the concept to be less known than the first) a good programmer must be dumb. Why? Because if he’s smart, and he knows he is smart, he will:

  a) stop learning
  b) stop being critical towards his own work

  Mmm hmm. Yes. I think this is correct but dumb is not the right word. The right word is paranoid; paranoid that one’s day job is silently sinking one’s own career by its lack of evolution.

• A fun post by Peter Kellner sings the praises of the semi-colon and indentation-neutral languages in general. I tend to agree. Dittohead programmers (yes we exist) all rally behind the premise of freedom, and freedom from indentation and spacing czars is no different.
• Now for the flame-bait of the day: Daniel Alexiu rips dependency injection, claiming it makes your code worse, not better. Hehe.

  I used to share Daniel’s phobia of XML files meaning more than the code itself, but I got over it once I hand-rolled my own dependency injection framework to better understand what that angle-bracketed black magic was doing for me. I’ve been known to hand-roll from time to time just to learn stuff.

  Come to find out, the entire rant is a facade for a larger complaint about OO in general. And aside from his valid complaint about mutable state and how hardly anyone uses Java in a truly OO way, I don’t see his gripe. Code is too abstract? Sounds like an assembly coder to me.

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This entry was posted on October 26, 2009 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Helltime with tags Helltime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.