April 2010 Archives

So why as a community or (dare I say Planet?) Do we use spaces? Or even the worst of all defaults: tabs + spaces at the same time

If setting your tabstop was EASY and TRIVIAL in emacs or vi then I suspect the world would be moving towards tabs and away from spaces. I do not see any advantages of spaces over tabs, instead I see a LOT of advantages of Tabs over spaces, and if tabs became the standard, I suspect the options would become even better.

The ONLY time I could advocate spaces and tabs together would be something like the following:

      if(somecondition &&
         some_other_condition &&
         a_third_condition){

Ironically, I couldn't paste in tab characters into the text field for the above effect. 

I will now put on my flame proof suit and wait near the garden hose.

If anyone is wondering I use emacs which by default uses tabs+spaces which is the worst of both worlds

In the past six weeks I have been on both sides of the table. I hope to be able to say that most of the code I passed along isn't too bad, and the dragons in it are well known. I also should point out that the dragons are not too bad in the code I am now working on. 

In either case, write good code now since you might not ever get a chance to go back to it again. 

The best ways to do this are to adopt coding standards and start following them. Do not switch from project to project, but keep them consistent. Adopt a set of rules for Perl::Tidy and Perl::Critic. If you do this you will be well on your way to writing code that is readable to the poor  saps that inherit your code base. 

And in the end, Karma might decide to give you a well maintained codebase too.

The perl code is not too bad. It was written with the intent of being readable. They have coding standards and they follow them. I may not agree with everything they standardized, but I follow them. I would much rather follow a standard I didn't agree with, than to have no standards at all. The code has a bit of tangle, but still not too bad.

The work ethic -- I am not really qualified to comment to much yet. I have noticed that they come in late, but they stay late too, so still not bad, just now how *I* operate. That's ok.

The organization of the work is really nice. I am being given single tickets in groups of three or four to work on. This is the first job that had a ticketing system that we actually used. Because of this, I am finding myself much more focused, and not distracted by the other tasks that need to get done. IE: do the current ticket *THEN* move on and work on that other problem.

The management is OK. My direct manager is a "get it done" person, which is probably why we have the ticketing system. He also wasn't with the project from the start, and therefore I believe that he would do some things very differently than the former VP of Engineering (You have probably heard of the former VP of engineering and his infamous worm)

I might not be able to keep this journal past this week as I am no longer employed by umn.edu, but because I was a student, I might be able to keep the blog. we will see.

If I am unable to continue on this blog, I will move to olegmperl.livejournal.com. Otherwise I will stay here.