Aviv's Blog Things I've Learned the Hard Way

Virtual Machines - why you should want them

Here's the one cool thing about working with a virtual machine (Like VMWare):
You can copy it for somebody else to work with.
Say you're part of a dev team, and your environment needs some adjustments: You need your Eclipse to use some specific configuration to work with your custom build tools, and to connect to the version-control server with a specific protocol - the whole thing might take a day or two to setup when a new member joins the team.
But if you use a VM as a standard, you can do this setting once, and just copy it for any new member, and they're all set.

Dynamic Languages, Done Wrong

I've been working with "Dynamic languages" for a very short time, but I know what bugs me about it: The code is very non-self-documenting.

There's a lot of "overhead" when coding in the more traditional "static" languages: All that annoying decelerations of types, and function parameters, and generally having to specify for each element what it can get and what it has to give - all the good reasons to use a dynamic, "just works," language. Because, really, the computer can figure it out - so why must I write all that junk?

Because the source code was never meant for the computer. The source was only there for humans - especially the human that would come after you've gone, and try to make heads and tails from your program. Maintainability, I believe it's called.

When reading code, all these pesky constraints act as documentation - they help figure out what that function expects and what it might give you back. That's even more important as your program turns bigger, and uses several layers of framework: you end up with functions that don't directly do things, but rather just pass their arguments to all sorts of other functions. Sometimes you need to dig 3-4 layers down, just to figure out if some function needs a specific string or a set containing that string. Or possibly a functions that returns a string? Or maybe it can handle each of them? If only it had some sort of hint about it - like maybe a typed argument, I wouldn't have to guess...