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Coding Horror

programming and human factors - Jeff Atwood

We Are Typists First, Programmers SecondNovember 18

Remember last week when I said coding was just writing?

I was wrong. As one commenter noted, it's even simpler than that.

[This] reminds me of a true "Dilbert moment" a few years ago, when my (obviously non-technical) boss commented that he never understood why it took months to develop software. "After all", he said, "it's just typing."

Like broken clocks, even pointy-haired managers are right once a day. Coding is just typing.

So if you want to become a great programmer, start by becoming a great typist. Just ask Steve Yegge.

I can't understand why professional programmers out there allow themselves to have a career without teaching themselves to type. It doesn't make any sense. It's like being, I dunno, an actor without knowing how to put your clothes on. It's showing up to the game unprepared. It's coming to a meeting without your slides. Going to class without your homework. Swimming in the Olympics wearing a pair of Eddie Bauer Adventurer Shorts.

Let's face it: it's lazy.

There's just no excuse for it. There are no excuses. I hav

Your Favorite NP-Complete CheatNovember 15

Have you ever heard a software engineer refer to a problem as "NP-complete"? That's fancy computer science jargon shorthand for "incredibly hard":

The most notable characteristic of NP-complete problems is that no fast solution to them is known; that is, the time required to solve the problem using any currently known algorithm increases very quickly as the size of the problem grows. As a result,

the time required to solve even moderately large versions of many of these problems easily reaches into the billions or trillions of years, using any amount of computing power available today. As a consequence, determining whether or not it is possible to solve these problems quickly is one of the principal unsolved problems in Computer Science today.

While a method for computing the solutions to NP-complete problems using a reasonable amount of time remains undiscovered, computer scientists and programmers still frequently encounter NP-complete problems. An expert programmer should be able to recognize an NP-complete problem so that he or she does not unknowingly waste time trying to solve a problem which so far has eluded generations of computer scientists.

You do want to be an expert programmer, don't you? Of course you do!

NP-complete problems are like hardcore pornography. Nobody can define what make

Stop Me If You Think You've Seen This Word BeforeNovember 13

If you've ever searched for anything, you've probably run into stop words. Stop words are words so common they are typically ignored for search purposes. That is, if you type in a stop word as one of your search terms, the search engine will ignore that word (if it can). If you attempt to search using nothing but stop words, the search engine will throw up its hands and tell you to try again.

Seems straightforward enough. But there can be issues with stop words. Imagine, for example, you wanted to search for information on this band.

"The" is one of the most common words in the English language, so a naive search for "The The" rarely ends well.

Let's consider some typical English stopword lists.

SQL Server stop words Oracle stop words 1 before these on him2 being they only himself3 between this or his 4 both those other how5 but through our if6 by toout in7 came too over into8 can under re is9 come up said it0 could use same itsabout did very see justafterdo want should likealldoes was since makealsoeach way so manyan else we some meand for well still mighta

Feeding My Graphics Card AddictionNovember 11

Hello, my name is Jeff Atwood, and I'm an addict.

I'm addicted... to video cards.

In fact, I've been addicted since 1996. Well, maybe a few years earlier than that if you count some of the classic 2D accelerators. But the true fascination didn't start until 1996, when the first consumer hardware 3D accelerators came to market. I followed their development avidly in newsgroups, and tried desperately to be the first kid on my block to own the first one. And boy did I ever succeed. Here's a partial list of what I remember owning in those early days:

• Rendition Verite V1000
• 3dfx Voodoo
• 3dfx Voodoo 2
• ATI Rage Pro
• NVIDIA Riva 128
• Matrox G400
• NVIDIA Riva TNT
• NVIDIA GeForce 256

(This is only a partial list, ranging from about 1996 to 2001 -- I don't want to bore you. And believe me, I could. I mean more than I already am.)

These were heady times indeed for 3D graphics enthusiasts (read: PC gamers). I distinctly remember playing the first DOS-based Tomb Raider on my 3dfx Voodoo using the proprietary GLIDE API. Sure, it's pathetic by today's standards, but the leap from software 3D to fast hardware 3D was quite dramatic from the trenches -- and far more graphically powerful than any console available.

This was a time when you could post a thread on a usenet newsgroup about a brand new 3D car

Coding: It's Just WritingNovember 9

In The Programming Aphorisms of Strunk and White, James Devlin does a typically excellent job of examining something I've been noticing myself over the last five years:

The unexpected relationship between writing code and writing.

There is perhaps no greater single reference on the topic of writing than Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. It's one of those essential books you discover in high school or college, and then spend the rest of your life wondering why other textbooks waste your time with all those unnecessary words to get their point across. Like all truly great books, it permanently changes the way you view the world, just a little.

Wikipedia provides a bit of history and context for this timeless book:

[The Elements of Style] was originally written in 1918 and privately published by Cornell University professor William Strunk, Jr., and was first revised with the help of Edward A. Tenney in 1935. In 1957, it came to the attention of

E. B. White at The New Yorker. White had studied under Strunk in 1919 but had since forgotten the "little book" which he called a "forty-three-page summation