Check your Spellchecker!

The german dictionary in Thunderbird has quite an interesting preference:

Jack for President!

Damit:

And here some facts about Jack:

• If Jack Bauer was gay, his name would be Chuck Norris.
• Jack Bauer has been to Mars. That's why there's no life on Mars.
• Every mathematical inequality officially ends with "< Jack Bauer".
• Jack Bauer was conceived by torturing the other sperm until they gave up the location of the egg.
• Superman wears Jack Bauer pajamas.

 

Cathedrals and Software

We build software like cathedrals: First build, then pray!

-Gerhard Chroust

Getting old

I was just reading my self-prescripted daily dose of blog-posts, when the truth caught up with me and destroyed my carefully-crafted self-image!

It all started when I stumbled across this post.

The post is quite interesting, since it breaks with the current Rails-hype (is this a sign, that Rails has reached the top of the hype cycle? I hope not, I just ordered my first Rails-book from Amazon…)

The background of the above post is Twitter… and now I get to the point of my post: I don't get it! What is this Twitter all about?

I desperately try to be hip and trendy! I am eagerly using delicious, gmail and google-reader but obviously this is all in vain. I have to face the hard truth: I am not of the Web-2.0–Generation!

About Signal-To-Noise

In the context of Domain Driven Design and Domain Specific Languages the Signal-To-Noise-Ratio of a Language/Programming-Environment is getting more and more attention lately.

I like the following statement on Object Mentor:

Clarity of code is a signal-to-noise ratio. We need our code to be as concisely meaningful as possible (not as cramped and crowded as possible, and not unnecessarily spread out over many pages). Whatever size provides the most accurate and quickest reading for trouble-shooting and enhancement is the best size.

In my opinion in the perfect programming environment every single statement a application developer is writing would have direct business meaning. All infrastructural concerns should be handled by the environment, and the developer should not have to care about it.

At the same time, the code the developer actually does write should be very expressive, and therefore might well be elaborate. It is the goal to minimize ‘non-business-code’ but it is not the goal to write as less code as possible.