I encountered some truly hideous source code today in a programming language in which I wouldn’t have thought hideous obscure code was possible: C#. It was my first real experience of abject horror when looking at the source code of a C# application. Obviously with hindsight it would seem that you can write hugely, dense, [...]
Monday, November 24, 2008
Jani Hartikainen has written an excellent post in reply to my earlier post about teaching software engineering students memory management, and his post is well worth a read. I started off writing a comment on his post as a reply but I ended up writing more than I expected as I refined my ideas.
I agree [...]
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Yesterday morning I spent a fascinating hour or so in a meeting listening to a very senior engineer give and in depth presentation about the performance characteristics of the low level memory systems on a console and the content of the presentation got me thinking about how software engineering is taught. Specifically are students being [...]
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
I’ve really needed to get round to learning a powerful object oriented scripted or interpreted programming language to replace windows batch files (which I currently use) for a while now. As Microsoft seems determined to gut their functionality with each new Windows release and I find myself wanting more functionality and power than batch scripts [...]
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
There are many different programing languages in existence today (I’m going to write about the languages I am familiar with) and I like to visualise their relationships as layers of a cake. There are two main ways to categorise programming languages: as having high or low levels of abstraction and as either compiled or interpreted [...]