Overanalyzed

Closures

This weekend, I learned about closures. Part of this has to do with the fact that I seem to be obsessed with StackOverflow.com; it was there that I found a question on closures with a link to an answer, and prompted my fire of discovery to go learn about them.

Closures are Functions-with-context. Usually used in formal proofs and the like, but also used in functional programming languages like Haskell. Languages like C are called imperative because they focus more on step-by-step action.

Anyway, the neat thing about a closure is persistence, or maybe independence, depending on how you think about it.
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Hacking Javascript

And here I mean “hacking” in the original sense of “making it work”, not “attacking websites”, as it is so commonly misused.

A lot of people don’t know that you can write javascript on the browser’s Address line. That javascript executes in the context of the page, so if you need to do some quick debugging, you can often just throw some script onto the Address line and off you go.
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Designing software

My own experience has been that one should shoot for simplicity, treat the business rules differently than design rules, and don’t put your data in your program. I prefer a toolbox approach, when you take it to the multiple subsystem level.
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Work Smarter not Harder

I hear that a lot. Or I used to. Now it seems like I mostly hear “work more”.

That’s not the point. Today it struck me how weird the phrases “work harder” and “work smarter” really are.

What’s your work? Mine is largely coding and software design, minus the social tax of meetings.

So there’s a pretty simple variable substitution. “Code harder”. Which sounds insane. It’s almost meaningless. “Design harder”.
What about smarter? “code smarter” or “design smarter”. Seems like a Good Thing. Totally opposed to KISS, so maybe not.

How “smart” should code or design be? Do you really want bobs_memcpy()? Class MemoryCopier? Seems to me that it should be as simple as it can be and get the job done, and no simpler. Sound familiar?

Asking for smarter code is asking for clever tricks. Asking for smarter design is asking for higher-altitude standards. Doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me.