Dragons in the Algorithm
Adventures in Programming
by Michael Chermside

Category: Programming

Binary Backward Compatibility

I saw this interesting article about a weakness in the Scala language. The weakness applies not just to Scala, but to pretty much any language: the community using the language cannot grow past a certain point until it somehow solves the problem of libraries depending on other libraries in a …

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Posted Wed 07 December 2011 by mcherm in Programming

Story Points

If you have complete and accurate requirements for your project which won't change, and your development team is spot-on in estimating and highly consistent in their development pace. and there are no surprises, then you can produce highly accurate project timeline estimates up front. Such accurate estimates are (or, more …

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Posted Wed 28 September 2011 by mcherm in Programming

When to Wrap a Library

I find that this comes up fairly frequently. You find some useful library: perhaps it does logging, or enforces design-by-contract, or it provides an API for calling web services. But someone on the team suggests that instead of using the library directly, we should create a wrapper: "that way, if …

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Posted Sun 03 July 2011 by mcherm in Programming