Mount Rushmore

I wish I had the time and talent to write like Joel Spolsky. He’s one of my favorite people in the public sphere of software engineering. Here’s a couple articles I read yesterday, they’re both oldies but goodies:

• Making Wrong Code Look Wrong – I’ve never been of fan of the “data type prefix” in variable names, so I was biased going into this discussion. But I was pleasantly surprised to hear the actual history of Hungarian Notation and that misuse of it was based on a misunderstanding of “type” vs “kind”.
• The Law of Leaky Abstractions – I’ve talked about abstractions before, they’re a central concept to the art of software development. Getting them right is hard; in fact, it might just be impossible.

You should check out Joel’s whole blog. It’s great.