The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Friday, June 29, 2007

GNU news is good news, I guess

Hmmm … it seems that the FSF has finally released the GPLv3 (with an accompanying FAQ).

This means I have to read through it and see if I like it or not, or if I should just stick with the old version 2 of the license for my projects.

Six Things I Learned About Programming

This is an interesting meme: Three Things I Learned About Software While Not In College (via reddit). And a lot of the comments are centering on three things learned in college and out of college.

So I'll play along here.

Three things I learned while at college:

  1. Not many students “got” programming, and far too many were there for the money (ha ha, the joke was on them come the Tech Stock Crash of 2001).
  2. It is possible to get into an upper level class and still have no clue how compilers work (“Where do the comments go?” indeed … ).
  3. Make friends with the system adminstrators—that way, you'll stand a better chance of avoiding … um … “complications” for pranks misunderstandings gone awry.

And the three things I've learned since:

  1. Clear code is better than clever hacks. Especially if you end up maintaining the codebase.
  2. You Aren't Gonna Need It.
  3. Not many people “get” programming, and far too many are proving this in Perl and PHP.

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