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Making trade-offs: To make code more performant, you generally have to make it less readable. Readability often involves introducing abstractions. You don't talk directly to your data base, you use JDBC. You don't follow pointers to find the next element in a collection, you ask the corresponding Iterator to return next(). The problem with this, according to Joel Spolsky, is that all abstractions leak. Today in Java Today Craig Castelaz discusses this balance in "Living with Leaks". Craig looks at Spolsky's Law of Leaky Abstractions and Keppler's continuum of abstractions that predates Spolsky's work by a decade. » Read more
(July 3, 2003 5:31AM PT)
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Living with Leaks:
Selecting the correct level of abstraction that hides the complexity of the implementation (but provides adequate control of the relevant details) can be a daunting task. Everyone has different ideas regarding "adequate control" and "relevant details." This article looks at five levels of abstraction. » Read more
(Jul 03, 2003)
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A Look Back at JavaOne:
This year's JavaOne conference attendence was about the same size as
last year, with about 12,000 attendees, but the mood was upbeat.
People are moving forward to make things happen. Barring some new huge
shock to the system, author John Mitchell is taking this as a leading indicator that we've
reached the bottom are heading back up. » Read more
(Jun 27, 2003)
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Exploring the Java Research License:
The Java Research License (JRL) was introduced at JavaOne as a new open source license for universities and research. A panel of java.net bloggers talk about the new license and invite you into the discussion. » Read more
(Jun 25, 2003)
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Cringely's Refactoring Refactoring:
Robert Cringely's second article on refactoring was more controversial than the first. He wrote "Touching working code is always a risk and so there should be a darned good reason for doing it. Adding features, worthwhile refactoring, or bug fixing are all possible good reasons. Tinkering with code or cleaning it up is not." Forget inflamatory remarks such as "tinkering with code", is cleaning up code a worthwhile activity? Cringley argues that for the most part it isn't in this I, Cringely article.
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Refactoring Cringely:
Although the Refactoring community reacted strongly against Cringely's article "Refactoring Refactoring", the man most associated with refactoring issued a moderated response. In Refactoring Cringely , Martin Fowler responded, noting "on the whole it sounds like I agree with a lot of what Cringely says. That's true, and it's true of the comments on the mailing list. On the whole the annoyance was about a feeling that Cringely mischaracterised refactoring in an eagerness to point the finger at fads." Fowler agrees that refactoring should not be applied everywhere but argues that Cringely has overstated the case in the other direction when Cringely says that 80% of refactoring is a waste of time.
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Egging on Cringely:
Paul Tyma wrote this blog entry about the original Cringely article (from the week before "Refactoring Refactoring". This paragraph was the controversial one "'Cleaning up code' is a terrible thing. Redesigning WORKING code into different WORKING code (also known as refactoring) is terrible. The reason is that once you touch WORKING code, it becomes NON-WORKING code, and the changes you make (once you get it working again) will never be known."
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Open Source, P2P, Weblogs, and Slime Mold
How often have you asked yourself, "What do Open Source software, peer-to-peer file sharing, and Weblogs have in common with, say, a big lump of disgusting mold?" Never? Neither have I. But that's no reason to leave the question unanswered.
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