Foo Infusion

A periodic infusion of foo from the world of a junior developer

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Real Developers

In a great bit of interweb cross-referencing, RAGANWALD has written a piece applying John Gruber's recent "And Organes" article's metaphor of 'Real Mac Users' to the world of software development.

I agree with both of them completely.

I have always felt uncomfortable with "Apple is better" argument. Similarly, I have always been wary of the "Agile is better" and "XP is better" and "Java is better" and ".NET is better" (and on and on forever - there's a flavour of fanatic for every idea) arguments as well.

Best quote: "... to an open mind, anything at all of interest is an opportunity to learn and improve."

I love this. I was speaking with a colleague the other day about curly braces. Like this: {}

I have been programming in VB.NET for 2 years now, nearly curly-brace-free. I don't miss them as much as I thought I would. I do, however, miss the clear scope definition that curly braces provide.

For example, when you see a method definition in C++/Java/C# you KNOW the anything inside curly braces only exists inside those curly braces. This can be a little more confusin in a language like VB that doesn't have this type of scope clarity built into the syntax. Python's indentation can leave people wondering about scope too, although I wish it didn't (I think the indentation is just about perfect. At least it 'sucks less' than the curly braces)

But I HATE using curly braces in try/catch blocks. I think it's terribly ugly. VB and Python really get top marks from me for their exception handling code. Although it's a little misleading because the try/catch/finally/end try lines are all lined up like they're at the same level... oh well.

That's the point though, right? Keep an open mind.

Speaking of keeping an open mind about development, I'd really love to have my own computer to do some experimentation with this new D thing.  Anyone out there with experience with this neat little project should let me know how it went.

Enjoy the articles.