Link-blog

I've setup an alternate feed that splices my bookmarks from del.icio.us with this blog's entries. You can find it here.

Pondering

"Formal methods will never have any impact until they can be used by people that don’t understand them."

Tom Melham

"The original study that showed huge variations in individual programming productivity was conducted in the late 1960s by Sackman, Erikson and Grant (1968). They studied professional programmers with an average of 7 years' experience and found that the ratio of initial coding time between the best and worst programmers was about 20 to 1, the ration of debugging times over 25 to 1, of program size 5 to 1, and of program execution speed about 10 to 1. They found no relationship between a programmer's amount of experience and code quality or productivity.

Although specific rations such as 25 to 1 aren't particularly meaningful , more general statements such as "There are order-of-magnitude differences among programmers'" are meaningful and have been confirmed by many other studies of professional programmers (Curtis 1981, Mills 1983, DeMarco and Lister 1985, Curtis et al. 1986, Card 1987, Boehm and Papaccio 1988, Valett and McGarry 1989, Boehm et al. 2000)."

Steve McConnell
Code Complete, Second Edition

"If you look at the way software gets written in most organizations, it's almost as if they were deliberately trying to do things wrong. In a sense, they are. One of the defining qualities of organizations since there have been such a thing is to treat individuals as interchangeable parts. This works well for more parallelizable tasks, like fighting wars. For most of history a well-drilled army of professional soldiers could be counted on to beat an army of individual warriors, no matter how valorous. But having ideas is not very parallelizable. And that's what programs are: ideas."

Paul Graham
Holding a Program in One's Head

"Software entities are more complex for their size than perhaps any other human construct because no two parts are alike (at least above the statement level). If they are, we make the two similar parts into a subroutine--open or closed. In this respect, software systems differ profoundly from computers, buildings, or automobiles, where repeated elements abound. [...]

The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence. For three centuries, mathematics and the physical sciences made great strides by constructing simplified models of complex phenomena, deriving properties from the models, and verifying those properties by experiment. This paradigm worked because the complexities ignored in the models were not the essential properties of the phenomena. It does not work when the complexities are the essence."

Fred Brooks
No Silver Bullet

"Architecture is intended to be facilitative, of course, in that a good architecture should enable developers to build applications quickly and easily, without having to spend significant amounts of time re-inventing similar infrastructure across multiple projects. [...]

But an architecture is also intended to be restrictive, in that it should channel software developers in a direction that leads to all of these successes, and away from potential decisions that would lead to problems later. In other words, as Microsoft's CLR architect Rico Mariani put it, a good architecture should enable developers to "fall into the pit of success", where if you just (to quote the proverbial surfer) "go with the flow", you make decisions that lead to all of those good qualities we just discussed. "

Ted Neward
Hard Questions About Architects

"The more interesting your types get, the less fun it is to write them down!"

Benjamin C. Pierce
Types and Programming Languages - The Next Generation

"If you don’t know the difference between a group, a ring, and a field, you have no business overloading operators.

Now I’m not saying that one has to take a course in abstract algebra before you can be a competent programmer. You don’t as long as the language you program in doesn’t support operator overloading (or as long as you’re wise enough not to use it if it does). However since most programmers are didn’t get beyond ODEs in college (if indeed they got that far–some of my comp sci friends struggled mightily with calculus and had to retake it repeatedly), one can’t responsibly design a language that requires mathematical sophistication in the 99th percentile for proper use."

Elliotte Rusty Harold
Operator Overloading: Trickier Than it Looks

"You used to start out in college with a course in data structures, with linked lists and hash tables and whatnot, with extensive use of pointers. Those courses were often used as weedout courses: they were so hard that anyone that couldn't handle the mental challenge of a CS degree would give up, which was a good thing, because if you thought pointers are hard, wait until you try to prove things about fixed point theory.

All the kids who did great in high school writing pong games in BASIC for their Apple II would get to college, take CompSci 101, a data structures course, and when they hit the pointers business their brains would just totally explode, and the next thing you knew, they were majoring in Political Science because law school seemed like a better idea. I've seen all kinds of figures for drop-out rates in CS and they're usually between 40% and 70%. The universities tend to see this as a waste; I think it's just a necessary culling of the people who aren't going to be happy or successful in programming careers."

Joel Spolsky
The Perils of JavaSchools

Administrivia

• I realized there is no point in keeping the blog bilingual, so from now on all posts will be in English. I may, some day, open another portuguese-only blog, but not anytime soon (I can barely post here more than once a month)
• But I do have another blog. I should have announced this a while ago, but better late then never, I guess. It is at http://blogs.sun.com/rafaelferreira. It is there because I've been working for Sun for the past few months - I'm a Sun Campus Ambassador at the University of São Paulo. That means, BTW, that if you're a student or a professor at USP and want to engage with Sun, I'm you're guy (hint: my name is Rafael Ferreira and all email addresses at Sun are formed as Firstname.Lastname@sun.com). On a related note, we have setup a JUG for the USP community at https://uspjug.dev.java.net/
• Oh, and obviously, all opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily shared by Sun Microsystems or any of my co-workers. Duh.
  

I'm (still) not dead

This is where I should be excusing myself for being "way too busy" to update my blog and promising that things will get back to "normal" soon. But I'm not actually so busier than usual, it's just that every post I thought about writing ended up larger that expected and taking more time that I have available (I think my brain needs a better job scheduling algorithm). I'll post something decent soon. Or not so soon, but eventually...

Anyway, this is not a link blog - I just can't seem to be able to write any commentary with less than ten lines - but I maintain my del.icio.us bookmarks reasonably well. So, if anyone is curious about stuff I find interesting take a look at http://del.icio.us/rafaeldff.

I'll end this useless keepalive post with another musical recommendation: The Jam is a pretty cool old band. Listen to "Eton Rifles", it sounds a bit like a Clash song.

The shortest post I have ever written to this web based virtual diary also known as an weblog or blog for short.

My current favorite band: Violent Femmes. Check it out.

Hmph.

Ontem eu fiz besteira e perdi o post que estava escrevendo. Para encher linguiça até que eu me anime a escrever sobre tecnologia de novo, aproveito para listar umas bandas que eu ando curtindo. Aviso que não sou um daqueles nerds indie que vendem a mãe e hipotecam a avó para pagar a assinatura do NME, por isso não espere novidades extraordinárias:

• Art Brut. Banda excelente e engraçada... Recomendo a música "My Little Brother", mas na real todas as músicas deles são legais.
• Arctic Monkeys. Enchi o saco de todo mundo dizendo que o hype é exagerado. A banda é boa, e não é culpa dos caras que uma parte da mídia resolveu coroá-los como O Próximo Strokes (que era para ser O Próximo Nirvana...). Ouça "Cigarete Smoke".
  
• A TPM passou e o Yeah Yeah Yeahs lança um disco mais calmo. IMHO, continua ótimo, mas eu sinto falta da Karen O se esgoelando. Música: "Turn Into", uma baladinha.
  
• Já o segundo disco do Dresden Dolls, "Oh, Virginia", me pareceu bem mais fraco que o primeiro....
• Rock Rocket. Mais um expoente (que palavrinha tosca) do rock etílico (pleonasmo?) brasileiro. Ouçam o hit "Ninfomaníaca".
  
• Chega por hoje.