Archive for March, 2007
Saturday, March 31st, 2007
From Wikipedia:
When applied to object-oriented programs, the Law of Demeter can be more precisely called the “Law of Demeter for Functions/Methods†(LoD-F). In this case, an object A can request a service (call a method) of an object instance B, but object A cannot “reach through†object B to access ...
Posted in Learn Programming | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007
For the sake of keeping code readable and as comprehend-able as possible, good functions comport to a few simple rules:
Give it one purpose. And the counting of the purposes shall be one. Not two purposes, not three purposes. Five is right out.
Continuing with the theme of having one purpose, subtasks ...
Posted in Learn Programming | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 27th, 2007
Dmiessler makes a good point I'd been meaning to make myself: the axiom against 'security through obscurity' is often taken too far. First of all, any kind of cryptography, whether the algorithms are publicly known or not, always ultimately relies upon 'obscurity' in the form of an unrevealed piece of ...
Posted in Tech | No Comments »
Monday, March 26th, 2007
I don't have to be Aunt Tillie to crave a simpler desktop computing experience. Whether I'm using Windows, OS X, GNOME, or KDE, my current work flow gets tangled as I juggle several open folder windows, half a dozen instances of Firefox with 30 tabs between them, a text editor, ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces, Tech | No Comments »
Monday, March 19th, 2007
Continuing a discussion of desktop UI from the previous post. Be clear that most of what follows applies equally to Windows and the Linux desktops; my point is that Apple popularized these ideas and the others----misguidedly----still follow Apple's lead.
Compared to Microsoft, I don't especially begrudge Macs for their existence, and ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces, Tech | 5 Comments »
Sunday, March 18th, 2007
The Linux community is often accused of being poor at catering to non-expert users, but this is a misdiagnoses. Contrary to myth, the community is not full of old Unix beards demanding the rest of us master perl before they give the rest of us the time of day. Surely, ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces, Tech | 1 Comment »
Saturday, March 3rd, 2007
How does one make sense of Java's version history for learners? The full story is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history, but here's the brief version:
First be clear that that there is only one Java language---one set of syntactical rules for how to write Java code. This set of rules has grown a few ...
Posted in Learn Programming, Tech | 3 Comments »
