Programming

This morning someone posted their snake game implementation to the Elm discourse asking for feedback on their implemenation. I thought the implementation was pretty fine, I had one structural comment but for the most part I’d be pretty happy to have to work on something from that code. My complaint though was that the author’s source code comments were mostly pointless, at least none of them were (yet) downright counter-productive, but it’s easy enough for comments to become so. I was reminded of an excellent student of mine who wrote a blog post (as part of their coursework) entitled ‘Delete this comment’ you can find it here. ...

Defensive programming is generally defined using terms such as ‘impossible’, one definition on the c2 wiki has Defend against the impossible because the impossible will happen. In addition there is also the idea to do the right thing. Such a definition is obviously (and intentionally) vague. The question is, what is the right thing? That’s always situation specific and it can be a difficult part in programming. That’s what I find interesting here, the programmer can easily make happen whatever we want, but it’s difficult to decide what we should want. That’s difficult to follow so let’s try an example. ...