I was reading Jeff Atwood’s latest post, Programming: Love it or Leave it when I came across this part, emphasis mine. Joel implied that good programmers love programming so much they’d do it for no pay at all. I won’t go quite that far, but I will note that the best programmers I’ve known have all had a lifelong passion for what they do. There's no way a minor economic blip would ever convince them they should do anything else. No way. No how. Unlike Jeff, I will go that far. I love to...
When searching for source code in a particular language, what do the words being searched on tell you about that language?
Koders.com publishes an interesting Open Source Zeitgeist which focuses on search trends and patterns within open source code. This is very similar to Google’s Zeitgeist, but grouped by programming language and specific to open source code. This might help us gain some insight into answering the above question.
For example, compare this screenshot of the top Ruby, Java, and C# searches.
It’s hard to draw any conclusive conclusions based on this sample, but let me offer a few uninformed thoughts, and you can tell...
Some computer scientist by the name of Donald Knuth once said, Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming. Bah! What did he know? Of course we all know what he meant, but when you take his statement at face value, the claim is a bit vague. What exactly is it that is being optimized? Well speed of course! At least that is the optimization that Knuth refers to and it is what developers typically mean when they use the term optimize. But there are many factors in software that can...
Just sticking my head above water long enough to take a breath and to link to some rubbish called the Programmer’s Bill of Rights that Jeff Atwood declares on his blog.
I don't understand this guy. You let this sort of dangerous propaganda spread and software departments will become much more efficient and be able to build better systems with less money.
You realize what that means, don't you? Companies will be able to get more done with less people.
For those who lose their jobs because of this, blame Atwood. Then again, if you’re reading his blog, you're probably not the...