Zen and the Art
Programming, specifically the intelligent design of such constructs, has always been at least twenty percent mimicry. Someone shows us how to write an efficient binary toggle and the practice stays with us. Learning how to find exclusive results between two SQL tables can shave minutes off of execution time, and your boss will certainly be [...]
Skill and Quirks
As with any profession, programming is a split of skill and quirks. Quirks come in many forms and can be quite useful or a bane. In JavaScript, for instance, you can reference a function as an object, which itself can be referenced as a hash. Thusly, window.foo[bar](baz) is perfectly valid(!). In PHP, an Array can [...]
Editorial Fail
Fox News, amazing reporter that it is, has apparently fired all of their editors and proof readers. Well, at least for their technical reports. Reporting on Google Latitude, an add-on to Google’s own Maps service, Fox forwarded an AP article on the mobile aspect of the new technology. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone will find the [...]
OOP-DBC
Coming out of high school, it was stressed that good practice makes good composition. One of these pillars of thought was code purity. Purity in the sense that each method should do as it’s advertised without causing side effects. It’s not much different than Design By Contract, (DBC) – a coding technique promoted in The [...]