There is always a voice recent years saying that coding will gradually die, software development is more like an assembly job. i.e, programmer will be more and more like IT engineers. They seldom build something from scratch, instead they achieve the goal by assemble different components.There are people who have similar views around me. From the book "Clean code" written by Robert C Martin--"One might argue that a book about code is somehow behind the times—that code is nolonger the issue; that we should be concerned about models and requirements instead.Indeed some have suggested that...

As an active member of "The Internet" and vocal Objective-C coder, I get a lot of questions surrounding the language. They're often framed around thinking about learning the language or trying to write an app, but they also usually involve a phrase like "Objective-C looks really hard" or "what are all those minus signs about?" Both of these are pretty good questions, and I'd like to address why someone might be more hesitant to jump into iOS or OS X development compared to, say, Ruby or Java.SyntaxLet's talk about what a programming language is. A programming language is the human-readable cod...

The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Bohr’s quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.A new study, forthcoming in Psychological Science, and led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this important concept. The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some people so much more effe...

“Techmeme has redesigned,” Gabe Rivera founder of the popular technology news site wrote in January 2012. “Drudge Report is now indisputably the web’s ugliest news site.”I use Techmeme all the time. I find it an excellent news website. It’s a collection of well-selected links to important issues in the technology industry. It doesn’t look pretty but it works fine for me. Asides from the quality of its stories it also has black text on white background and a fairly large size, legible font. Gabe Rivera claims that Drudge Report is “the webâ€...

Charlie Kindel (who left Microsoft earlier this year after 21 years, most recently as a Windows Phone General Manager), posted today on an “impedance mismatch” between carriers and device manufacturers, and Windows Phone, where those carriers and OEMs are “reluctant” to push Windows Phone, while Google’s Android has taken an approach that “reduces friction with carriers & device manufacturers at the expense of end users”.Kindel seems to be implying that Microsoft has taken the road less travelled, choosing to fight it out with the carriers and OEM...

The most important thing I have done as a programmer in recent years is to aggressively pursue static code analysis.  Even more valuable than the hundreds of serious bugs I have prevented with it is the change in mindset about the way I view software reliability and code quality.It is important to say right up front that quality isn’t everything, and acknowledging it isn’t some sort of moral failing.  Value is what you are trying to produce, and quality is only one aspect of it, intermixed with cost, features, and other factors.  There have been plenty of hugely su...

Anyone who claims to be even remotely versed in computer science knows what “spaghetti code” is. That type of code still sadly exists. But today we also have, for lack of a better term — and sticking to the pasta metaphor — “lasagna code”.Lasagna Code is layer upon layer of abstractions, objects and other meaningless misdirections that result in bloated, hard to maintain code all in the name of “clarity”. It drives me nuts to see how badly some code today is. And then you come across how small Turbo Pascal v3 was, and after comprehending i...