The Art of Building Modern Software

From APIDesign

Revision as of 21:14, 6 February 2009

Have You Ever Wondered...?

Have you ever considered yourself an artist when coding? Do you think programming is kind of art? Have you noticed the difference in developing software systems today and twenty years ago? Do you know why people consider ugly solutions wrong? If you ever asked questions like this, this chapter gives you answers that I found after many years of oscillating between feeling like an artist and behaving as an engineer.

Have you ever hopelessly searched for new programmers? We do it all the time and it looks like we are constantly running out of good programmers. But how good does a programmer have to be to produce good software? Maybe it is enough if one can code HTML.

Current or Certain?

p. 13, para 2 - should "at its certain revision" be "at its current revision"? --David Biesack 20:25, 5 February 2009 (TC)

Thanks for your comment David. Current is not bad choice and I was considering it too, but its meaning is not clear. What it means to use current version of a library? For the library author, current means the development version. For the library user, it is the version that the user is using. Obviously not every user is working on the same schedule. There are always more important things to do than to upgrade to the latest version of a library and as such there is many subjective current versions.

That is why I used certain - it expresses a bit of uncertainty - and points out that the library in use is just at some version, one of many. That there is is nothing special or privileged in it.

Of course, I am not native speaker and as such my understanding of differences between certain and current may not be fully accurate.

--JaroslavTulach 21:00, 6 February 2009 (UTC)