You are currently browsing the daily archive for December 23rd, 2007.
Courtesy of Chaotic Utopia:
I think this should be required reading for any novice programmer and probably even more so for established programmers. Agree with him or not, I think you’ll agree that Steve Yegge has some interesting things to say. My favorite quote:
“Bigger is just something you have to live with in Java. Growth is a fact of life. Java is like a variant of the game of Tetris in which none of the pieces can fill gaps created by the other pieces, so all you can do is pile them up endlessly.”
This is especially interesting to me as I just jumped on the IDE bandwagon. I received a few interesting comments on that post that are worth reading. A minor theme was the fact that you just can’t handle a massive code base without some kind of IDE (Integrated Development Environment). I have worked with a code base of about 20,000 lines of Java with no IDE and there were certainly challenges. I have also worked with a code base of over 100k lines of C (not ++) and that was a pain in the butt. Massive changes took me days to complete and then weeks to debug. Having an IDE would have made it easier, but it also would have made it much larger. It is so easy to bloat up code with every kind of get/set method and constructor there is, but many of them are never used. Is that a bad thing or just good future planning? There is definitely a trade off, and one that probably comes down on the side of bad thing more often than not.
In any case, it’s something I have to keep in mind as I go forward with my new project.
