Marketing is the art of making something seem better than it really is. -Suso Banderas

Marketing. Ain’t it grand? All those jingles in your head, all the brands you buy, all the old AOL discs you have floating around… who is to thank? Marketing. Marketing and developer trends have pretty much been independent of each other as most developers seem to have a firm grasp on what is being marketed to them and what the genuine article is (hence Linux wasn’t just a pipe dream). Marketing was mostly left to the business people who couldn’t fit in technical manuals in between their yachting and weekly car buying agendas. They didn’t care what virus protection was, or Y2k, or what-have-you… they just knew they needed it. And that, my friends, is why I hate this Web 2.0 crap.

Note: If you couldn’t tell, I’m not pulling these quotes out of my rear. I want to thank the owner of http://en.wikiquote.org/ for the ironic use of his application.

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“Two wrongs may not make a right, but a thousand wrongs make a writer.” - Dennis Miller

I recently wrote a post called The Reality of Bad Programmers, I made an assessment that so long as a program is to specification and someone is buying it, you’re not a bad programmer. In the discussion and comments that ensued, I had to come to a realization that the statements made may require some revision. That’s not to say I think I was entirely off-base, just that I might have to clarify.

To clarify: I do not believe that good programmers do not exist. I do not believe that bad programmers do not exist. I do not believe that good code does not exist. I do not believe that bad code does not exist. I believe that our measurement for good and bad must be a strong lower-bounded assessment.

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“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty —a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.” - Bertrand Russell

The biggest complaint heard amongst a lot of computer science majors is how little most of our math education effects our programming education. While by the end of the major, most people tend to see the light, there are still a few who claim that, “Blah blah class isn’t worth it.” You know what, though, they’re missing the point.

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“Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Or put more succinctly:

“Common sense is not so common.” - Voltaire

Note: Oddly enough, as I was writing this article, I noticed that a commenter to this new site, Daniel, had a post which touched on some points I was about to make. For the sake of good authorship, I am citing his work as it surely influenced mine.
No, inheritance is not the way to achieve code reuse!
Thanks Daniel! Keep up the great posts!

What makes someone a thinker? By most accounts, the mere act of thinking should qualify someone for such a title. I am not speaking about the act of thinking, though. That’s far too common, and what I’m talking about is extremely uncommon. Ironically, I’m speaking, of course, about “common sense” thinking.

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Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the universe is amenable to the scientific process. - Isaac Asimov

I’ve been reading a lot of articles lately outlining what defines a bad programmer. I find this to be a particularly interesting topic myself as often times I am accusing other programmers of being “bad”. Upon reflection, and after reading these articles, I must admit, this is an unfair term. The term “bad” in this context is completely subjective. By calling someone a “bad programmer,” you’re applying standards to them which aren’t universally true. It would be a fair assumption to say that we’ve all wrote “hacks” in our times, and on many occasions, those hacks were out of the necessity of the situation and not what the developer would like to do.

What I’m getting at here is that there aren’t bad programmers, there are bad programs… and even those often aren’t “bad” if they are taken into context. So what does all this talk of so-called “bad programmers” actually mean? It means we’re frustrated. It means we, as developers, strongly desire some metrics for determining “goodness” or “badness” of not only the code of others, but even our own.

Why is this still a problem? After over fifty years of code, we still cannot figure out what makes a program good?!? That would seem like a problem… on the surface. It’s not. Here’s why:

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