I hate them. I am especially annoyed when a library that exposes some sort of API requires it’s own configuration file. So, not only do you have a configuration file for your application, you also have to have another for this stupid library you integrated into your application. Wouldn’t it be nicer for the API to expose some methods, structures or something so that the data needed by the api could be set from the consuming application? That way, if you insisted in persisting these settings in a file you could do so in the application config file, giving you a single config file instead of two. I suppose one might make an exception and have a separate config file for a something that is so pervasive that is canonical like the log4XX logging libraries.
i’m hanging out at lisa’s house, noodling around with this some stuff i’m working on with some of my friends it’s cool and it’s got me excited about doing tech stuff again using lighttpd ruby memcached sqllite and a bunch of other cool stuff anyway i’m setting up a development instance of lighttpd and i want to see if i’m doing anything with port 3000 on my dev box so i fire up firefox and type http://localhost:3000/ in the address window great server not found oh hey i think i’ll look at facebook oh hey that link to christopher walken’s twitters looks cool oh hey i think i’ll check my rss reader oh hey this article looks interesting and two hours later i haven’t accomplished a fucking thing
Defensive Programming is usually thought of as a software quality technique but I have another use for the term. Defensive Programming happens when you are dealing with two or more modules of code that interact with one another in some way and the modules are written by different developers. That’s the programming part. The defensive part happens when something is wrong and each of the developers blames the other for the as yet unknown problem because they are covering their ass, have low self esteem, are lazy, are arrogant, you fill in the blank. This drives me nuts. Let’s just collaborate to solve the f*ing problem. Software has bugs. It’s fundamental. If the defensive programmer spent half of the time they spent pointing the finger at someone else fixing bugs in their own code we’d all be better off.
