Test driven development is a beast to tame. I like TDD but in the past it was quite difficult to achive, at least in a pure-consultant approach with a "turn key" framework behind.

There are two major concept often not grasped correctly.

Read More

Modern computer are very very very fast. C/64 was about 1Mhz and you can hangs it just throwing a 10.000 cycle in interpreted BASIC v2 language.

Slowest computer today are clocked 3Ghz (3000Mhz!) and are super scalar: it means they can usually execute 2 or more instructions per core in parallel, and you get at least 2 cores on the tiny one (RasperryPi2 has 4 ARM cores, for instance). The sow Intel centrino has at least 2 ALU and can execute between one and two instruction in parallel (mostly arithmetic one).

Read More

I think constants are evil (just joking but….I will explain why).

I am tired of seeing a lot of Java classes filled with the same constants repeated over and over again, instead of collecting them in a common file, which in C Language was called include files (ooooah!).

Read More

In the 1980 comments were used to reduce the “gap” between unstructured code and “rationale” behind the code.

1. C/64 Peek and poke where oscure.
2. Gosub on function pointed by numbers was bad
3. 8-bit systems was tight on command names and so on (think to write a python interpreter in Arduino/bbc:Micro, or look at the memory consumed by the COMMAND STRINGS on C/64 Basic v2)
4. C code was not expressive, but good code required little comment, as you can see here

Today comments are used to:

1. Comment obscure code -> instead of writing it better
2. Comment caching code you will end up to commit breaking production ->instead of having a cache config to disable cache on dev machines
3. Comment not working code will end up in production, producing functional breaks -> because you will forget it and  commit the bad version

When I am sent on a Red Project, the code is often obscure and not commented at all. So I dare to suggest to deprecate comments at all, replacing it with a set of meta annotation like:

@Comment("Documentation of this class/method/function/closure")
@Fixme("Reason")
@Todo("Why",  deadline=20230423)

 

 

Read More

Today I took a light rail with my son, to bring him to school. That tram is 90 years old. It has been maintained for 90 years. Milan city sold some of them to San Francisco too.

Read More

I like a lot of programming languages. I do not love them with the same intensity.

I do not love Lisp for its ((syntax))), but Lisp rocks for its purity: in a tiny bag of concept, you get a lot of stuff.

This article, (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python)) show you how it is easy to write a lisp interpreter in python. It is 113 lines of code, and include the parser the executor and the basic functions to get started.

Read More

So Dart Sith has just launched his first DeathStar, my young JavaScript fellow: a site devoted to the Dart language

Because I am a very old Jedi (1974, before ever the first WtartWars trilogy showdown)  I had to rest a bit before talking about it, so the news is 4-days old I know. I needed to think, reflect and write down: but now I am ready, Read on…

Read More