In some ways programming is like pointillism, the individual dots have no meaning until you step back and view the whole thing. The best programmers have the ability to do that in their mind and see the entire Parade, the rest of us work with one “face” at a time.
]]>Java is a little too free-form, which leads to sloppy code. I can’t tell you how many programs I’ve looked at that had huge chunks of code that did nothing, because there was no way of reaching it. Sometimes it was just commented out, but other times you find the process in two different places, because, apparently, the structure changed and an important procedure was no longer reachable by the logic.
A little time planning can save a lot of time programming, but bosses want to see people coding, not thinking.
]]>You said a mouthful (typed a textarea full?), Bryan. One thing every successor to C has done is to hide the existence of pointers, or enforce what kind of thing they point to, or restrict arithmetic on them, or deal with memory management behind the scenes, or all of the above. I pulled all the usual nasty tricks in my C programming days… probably a good 10 years of my career… but one had to compensate by buying third-party tools to help find one’s own inevitable screw-ups.
FORTRAN had a straightforwardness to it that stood a programmer in good stead when s/he inherited a large mass of someone else’s code in bad condition. Imagine unscrambling a Java application… mind you, I actually sort of like Java… that someone else crafted badly. Backus and his team deserve a lot of credit for that simplicity. “Amazing Grace” Hopper is comparably admirable for the conceptual underpinnings of COBOL, the earliest widely available language I can think of that encouraged programmers to think of data structures explicitly… even if the COBOL language itself required verbosity beyond even, say, my English prose style. 🙂
]]>I credit it with teaching me that math and algebra is a language with subjects, verbs, modifiers, and complements, and after all those years of elementary and middle-school struggles with numbers, it all made sense to me by appealing to my natural abilities as a writer. That semester of computer science in 9th grade was the only time I got an A in math.
]]>The newer languages are great, as long as you are not breaking new ground, but, if something doesn’t works you are stuck. With the lower level languages you can always tell an appropriate lie to convince the computer to do what you want.
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