Quotes About Development

The Western countries have experienced a development trajectory in which higher wages led to the invention of labour-saving technology, whose use drove up labour productivity and wages with it.

These developments were not due to a conspiracy among the rich nor simply to colonialism (although it played a role). They were the result of one of the fundamental principles of economics – comparative advantage.

The proper use of comments is to compensate for our failure to express ourself in code. Note that I used the word failure. I meant it. Comments are always failures.

When you see commented-out code, delete it!

The first rule of functions is that they should be small. The second rule of functions is that they should be smaller than that.

First Law You may not write production code until you have written a failing unit test. Second Law You may not write more of a unit test than is sufficient to fail, and not compiling is failing. Third Law You may not write more production code than is sufficient to pass the currently failing test.

It is a myth that we can get systems "right the first time." Instead, we should implement only today's stories, then refactor and expand the system to implement new stories tomorrow. This is the essence of iterative and incremental agility. Test-driven development, refactoring, and the clean code they produce make this work at the code level.

Error handling is important, but if it obscures logic, it's wrong.

No matter how elegant it is, no matter how readable and accessible, if it hath not tests, it be unclean. Dave

Another problem with service-level decoupling is that it is expensive, both in development time and in system resources. Dealing with service boundaries where none are needed is a waste of effort, memory, and cycles. And, yes, I know that the last two are cheap—but the first is not.

The unit tests are documents. They describe the lowest-level design of the system.

In fact, wrapping third-party APIs is a best practice. When you wrap a third-party API, you minimize your dependencies upon it:

The first value of software—behavior—is urgent but not always particularly important. The second value of software—architecture—is important but never particularly urgent.

If we all checked-in our code a little cleaner than when we checked it out, the code simply could not rot.

Code, without tests, is not clean. No matter how elegant it is, no matter how readable and accessible, if it hath not tests, it be unclean. Dave

It is a myth that we can get systems "right the first time." Instead, we should implement only today's stories, then refactor and expand the system to implement new stories tomorrow. This is the essence of iterative and incremental agility.

Without tests every change is a possible bug. No

if I must encode either the interface or the implementation, I choose the implementation. Calling it ShapeFactoryImp, or even the hideous CShapeFactory, is preferable to encoding the interface.

1. "First make it work." You are out of business if it doesn't work. 2. "Then make it right." Refactor the code so that you and others can understand it and evolve it as needs change or are better understood. 3. "Then make it fast." Refactor the code for "needed" performance.

We programmers simply do not know how long things will take. This isn't because we are incompetent or lazy; it's because there is simply no way to know how complicated a task is going to be until that task is engaged and finished. But, as we'll see, all is not lost.

If you let the tests rot, then your code will rot too. Keep your tests clean.

abstraction is evil. Code is anti-evil, and clean code is perhaps divine.

Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build, and test." —Ray Ozzie, CTO, Microsoft Corporation

Factories are a complexity that can often be avoided, especially in the early phases of an evolving design.