Re: Why there will always be programmers

On Friday 31 October 2008, Omer Zak wrote:
> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/10/27/why-there-will-always-be-programme
>rs/ Summary:
> Programmers are always needed, because big programs have lots of
> details, and somebody has to manage those details.
>
> Now, quick!  What are your tips and tricks for managing the details of
> your projects?

Well, I never initiated large-scale projects on my own, just contributed to 
large-scale ( > 100K LOCs) projects that other people initiated.

Well, first of all I make sure the projects are adequately modular and 
componentised. Each module, class, function etc. should do something and 
something well. This makes it easy to find.

Meaningful and conventional variable names also help a lot to find offending 
code.

Then I use tools like grep, http://petdance.com/ack/ , ctags, etc. to find 
what I want. These are especially useful with gvim's quickfix mode.

I personally don't write too much external documentation, except for 
perlpod/etc. API-documentation for the user. I also prefer to factor out code 
with meaningful names for the extracted functions than to comment bad code. 
From my experience, external documentation tends to get out-of-sync with the 
code itself and so is not such a good idea. Your code should be 
self-documenting.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
What Makes Software Apps High Quality -  http://xrl.us/bkeuk

Shlomi, so what are you working on? Working on a new wiki about unit testing 
fortunes in freecell? -- Ran Eilam

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