Lines of Code

Shakespeare’s sonnets have exactly 14 lines, his plays have usually around 2600 lines (Hamlet about 4000 lines). This is not that different from the few thousand lines of code a typical programmer writes for a unit, library or project, for example jQuery 1.2 and 1.3 have around 4000 LoC (jQuery 1.2.6: 3549 LoC, jQuery 1.3.2: [...]

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Longing for World Domination

As a computer programmer or software developer, you long each day for world domination. To be precise, you stagger constantly between world domination (in German “Weltherrschaft”) and total powerlessness, between absolute might and complete plight, between omnipotence and complete impotence. One day you feel like a mighty emperor, and the next day you feel like [...]

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Absolute power

In the universe which he has created, the computer programmer is the king. He can do what he wants, and like the lion above he has absolute power (a photo from Flickr user RodBegbie). Weizenbaum said in his book Computer Power and Human Reason:
The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone [...]

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Test vs. Type

Is correctness or verification a question of test vs. type (because dynamic languages as Python or Ruby without strong typing can not be relied on to create large programs) ? It is true that testing is especially important for dynamic languages, and sometimes neglected for traditional, strongly typed languages as C# or Java. I think [...]

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