http://www.artima.com/weblogs/index.jsp?blogger=andydent Artima Weblogs is a community of bloggers posting on a wide range of topics of interest to software developers. http://www.artima.com/images/artima88x33.gif http://www.artima.com/ http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=268226 Can a focus on C++ get me through the next twenty-odd years? Is it time to stop chasing bright, shiny new languages and consolidate as a guru? A few thoughts on "legacy languages" and the later stages of a coding career. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=240826 Trying to do some simple file processing and strip blank lines, Andy stumbles through the "Ruby is supposed to feel natural" approach and just tries things. The conclusion - Python list comprehensions are still more flexible and powerful than any Ruby feature and inject is possibly the most misleadingly named function I've ever encountered. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=240319 Inspired by the Adventures of a Pythonista in Schemeland series and being engaged in my own learning experience, here's the start of a series by a language geek with about 18 years of OO development experience, trying to get to the heart of Ruby. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=240268 A large body of unit tests as a regression test system is important to many organizations. What do you do when your framework of choice dies or is neglected? When is it time to move on and how do you budget for abandoning or rewriting tests? Have you ever thought about being caught by this situation? http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=239828 An attempt to answer the question - given 1 million lines of code in the repository (i.e. SVN), is there some rule of thumb as to the number of developers we have to keep on staff just to maintain those 1 million lines of code? http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=220174 Ruby is the cool new kid of on the block and has some significant cred in code-generation circles. Python has whitespace sensitivities that make it a poorer fit for templating solutions. This sounds like a no-brainer decision but is the real argument about which language the market wants to see used? http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=218195 A shower song to remind me why it's useful to write down alternatives and reasoning. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=208868 Would you hire a programmer who insisted on working things out or using APIs solely from memory? If we expect people to be able to quickly research things on the web as part of the programming, why not include that in interviews? Is search efficiency a skill that should be on your resume? http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=189510 Everything I'm doing seems to be about small chunks of thought. These chunks need tracking, comparing, versions controlling and melding into presentations of varying narrative richness. The interesting projects and interested parties include software engineers, publishers and academics but there's no killer app in sight? http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=189208 In which Andy suffers an extreme bout of cynical disbelief in the merits of Resource Oriented Architecture and "solving" the discovery problem by giving up and just having a description as part of a "Resource". http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=187239 How do you develop a Roadmap for a broad-ranging community, encompassing several service-oriented architectures? Here are some ideas. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=180637 How do you transfer knowledge about a system in an optimal way, without forever being the 'guy who knows'? What practices will help you exit gracefully? Or, even if you aren't leaving this area of the project, how do you lessen the documentation burden? http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=174969 There are two kinds of software experience you want for your end users - Invisibility and Smile on My Face. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=167444 OO frameworks, especially in the C++ world, have usually shipped with source. This is often highly educational and sometimes a life-saver. Until, Apple didn't ship the Cocoa source. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=167050 Given a solid OO education and C++ background but having missed some of the traditional CS language theory, what is a minimum required reading list, especially when designing a non-traditional language?