Re: Why there will always be programmers

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 9:05 PM, Shlomi Fish <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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.


I certainly agree that code should be self documenting as much as possible.
Sometimes even in line documentation in the form of comments, tends to stay
out of date. I have seen case when during debugging of some software, some
functions where changed but the comments stayed the same.

-- 
Ori Idan


>
>
> 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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