One convenient source of a massive corpus of data suitable for data mining is the mass of e-mail that arrives at our system every day.
E-mail is a surprisingly interesting data format. It contains a lot of structured, regular data in the form of mail headers, which is easy for a computer to parse. Unfortunately, the utility of the mail headers is pretty hit and miss.
– Simon Cozens, Mining Mail, The Perl Journal, December 2002
When you spot a class interface that is no longer used by any client, but that nobody dare delete, that’s cruft. It is also the word “seperate,” added to a spellchecker’s private dictionary in a moment of careless haste, and now waiting for a suitably important document.
All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy god-mothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists. But however the selection process works, the result is indisputable: “This time it will surely run,” or “I just found the last bug.”
– Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month
Whenever you have a problem, whether you are writing an article or building a doghouse, do not look inside for the solution. Do not ask: “How do I do it? Why don’t I know it?” Look outside and ask: “What is the nature of the thing I want to do?”
What is the nature of an article? First observe that you cannot do everything at once. Whatever you are writing – a theoretical work on a revolutionary idea or a small piece about a narrow concrete – you cannot say everything you know about the subject. You must accept this premise fully, so that it becomes part of your subconscious and operates automatically. You can do this by asking yourself whether you always knew everything you know today. Obviously you did not. Knowledge is acquired in steps.
– Ayn Rand, The Art of Nonfiction
Every valuable creative idea (concepts and perceptions, not artistic expression) must always be logical in hindsight. If it was not, we could never recognize the value of that idea. It could only seem a ‘crazy idea’. We might catch up with it in twenty years time – or never, for it might truly be a crazy idea.
– Edward de Bono, I Am Right – You Are Wrong
Tony Bowden introduces a brilliantly simple way to interface to a relational database using Perl classes and the Class::DBI module
I’ve just come back from BT’s eBusiness Seminar and my head is buzzing. To pass time I didn’t play buzz-word bingo. Instead I made notes of the number of different things they could put an ‘e’ in front of.
Two British researchers have developed a prototype “phone tooth” that can be embedded in a molar and receive cell-phone calls.
– Time, Coolest Inventions 2002, November 25, 2002
Asking whether patterns and frameworks reduce discovery costs is like asking whether someone who knows something about billing is going to have an easier time making a billing system than someone who doesn’t. Of course! The problem is whether we have the right patterns and frameworks to reduce discovery costs. If not, how can we get them?
– Ralph Johnson
Too many projects look for the “home run” in reusable platforms and frameworks. Frameworks work well only if they can predict well: to predict what will change, and what will not. This is a difficult enough problem for individual objects or modules, let alone for extensible application skeletons. Small frameworks like MVC work, but few large frameworks enjoy success.
– Jim Coplien
Proceedings of the 1997 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications, Beyond the hype (panel): do patterns and frameworks reduce discovery costs?
I gave a lecture this afternoon to a group of students who are getting ready to go on their placement year. It had never occurred to me that the state of the I.T. industry would be affecting students. Last year they had students on the Software Engineering course who didn’t manage to find placements. They also had students who were made redundant.