-
I’m Irritated/Irked by the Term UI/UX
The term UI/UX (for User Interface/User eXperience) has been in circulation for quite a while now. The slash between the two acronyms indicates that they are considered to be two sides of the same coin. They are not. In fact, the term UI/UX makes about as much sense as Bricklayer/Architect. UI deals with the technologies,…
-
Stop Bitching About Type Erasure and Use It as an Excuse to Write Better Code
Type erasure has long been the bane of many a Java developer. For those not familiar with the term, here’s a condensed history. Generics were added to Java in 2004 with the release of Java 5. This feature allows you to specify type parameters to a class to provide tighter checks at compile-time, and facilitates…
-
I Take Exception to Sloppy Exception Handling
Exceptions are a block of code’s way of saying “something, possibly unexpected, happened and as a result I can’t do what I’m supposed to do.” They have been around long enough that we’ve taken them for granted. We’ve lost touch with the importance of having a good exception handling strategy. At least, that’s the conclusion…
-
How to Safely Lose Your Abstraction
For years, I’ve heard complaints from developers about boilerplate code in programming languages. These complaints are usually not about, and shouldn’t be about, writing the boilerplate code. First of all, any decent IDE can generate the vast majority of it for you. Secondly, how much code you have to write is irrelevant since you’re only…
-
Of Elephants and Taxonomies
In my previous post, I concluded by mentioning that while inheritance hierarchies represent knowledge that is obtained through deductive reasoning, delegation allows us to build taxonomies dynamically from instances through inductive reasoning. In this post, I’d like to explore this idea further and examine how we build our own taxonomies during the process of learning….
-
Inheritance With One Hand Tied Behind Your Back
I’ve recently started learning the programming language Go in order to support my current client. It reminds me a bit of my days writing C code, though it has some interesting features such as goroutines, a lightweight, easy-to-use tasking model. It’s not a full object-oriented language, but it has interfaces which allows it to support…