While thinking about a programming language deficiency, I rediscovered polymorphism. Overloading a function allows a function call to behave differently when passed variables of different type. I was trying to devise a method of simulating function overloading, because PHP does not support it. I considered implementing a function with an if-else statement ladder that tests […]
An item on eweek.com references a supposed Microsoft developer’s blog entry, which conveys frustration with the decision to ship a product that is not ready for release. This developer’s sentiments are definitely shared among many developers in other software development pursuits. The developer’s attachment to the product and the dedication to minimize its faults is […]
I was reading through slashdot.org, and I found a post that asks members of the slashdot community how they “reverse engineer” large software. Numerous replies did not agree with the original poster’s use of the term, “reverse engineering.” Many people held the incorrect notion that reverse engineering is an illegal or unethical practice. I have […]
In Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective, Dijkstra states: It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. It has been three years since his death, and it is obvious that I have not […]
I’m proud of writing elegant code that can be easily read and intuitively understood. I use whitespace to increase my code’s readability, and I utilize simple, specialized programming language constructs to make my code more concise. For example, I’ll use PHP’s foreach construct, instead of a traditional for loop, to eliminate unnecessary indexers. This construct […]