Comments on: You’re Doing it Wrong If

By: Ole Phat Stu

Ole Phat Stu — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:33:41 +0000

Apart from in the dictionary :

Usability comes before Reusability!

By: Joseph A. Nagy, Jr.

Joseph A. Nagy, Jr. — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 02:20:02 +0000

I hate to admit it, but I’m guilty of more then one of those ‘crimes’. I’m working on changing, though.

By: Paul Keeble

Paul Keeble — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:18:48 +0000

Alas your preaching to the choir. The very audience that would benefit from rules of thumb such as these doesn’t read blogs. The very few that do very quickly pick up and surpass these sorts of rules.

I think we underplay how clever as a group developers are. There are some terrible ones sure but for the most part someone in the team can see a better easier way to do it, the problem is always time and priorities.

By: Diego Carrion

Diego Carrion — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:32:02 +0000

You’re Doing it Wrong If

You dont write unit/functional/you_call_it tests

By: chris

chris — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:43:34 +0000

@AC: “Interesting how some of these go directly against Joel’s recommendations.”

Bear in mind that I wrote “web app” for a reason. FogBugz is more like conventional software in that it is designed to be deployed across multiple operating environments. It just happens to be web-based. Hence the use of their own language to generate language-specific code (PHP/VB etc.).

In such exceptional cases it makes good sense to be exceptional. If I made be so bold as to put words in his mouth, I doubt Joel would suggest everyone take the same approach.

Excel too is compiled software and they only avoided external dependencies if you ignore the vast framework of pre-existing libraries and code that MS had at the time. Just like OS X developers ignore external dependencies only if we choose to ignore the entire Cocoa framework.

I wonder: I bet it’d be pretty rare to hear Windows developers or Mac developers arguing that you should ignore .Net or Cocoa and write your own frameworks, using the arguments the nay-sayers have made above (”those Apple engineers are stupid. I can write my own text-rendering code way better and faster than Apple can!”)

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:54:43 +0000

Rules are great. There’s no way that any developer could remember exactly what to do in every situation. Instead, you remember a general rule (to cover most cases) and you remember when and why you should make exceptions to the rule (to cover the other cases).

But the rules are the easy parts. We know them. There’s very little speculation about them. The problem is figuring out when and why an exception should be made. If all you give us is a list of rules, it looks like you’re the one who swears by this list.

Anyone could have written that list. Frameworks do some of the work for you? No kidding! Give us an example of how a particular framework helped you, or give us a situation where you decided it was better to write something yourself. Just give us some insight about something, otherwise it’s just another crummy blog post that has 500 words but not a single thing worth reading.

By: AC

AC — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:22:47 +0000

Interesting how some of these go directly against Joel’s recommendations. He wrote a really long post about how Excel avoided external dependencies and was better off for it. Not to mention his shop has their own bizarre web language they wrote.

By: Phil

Phil — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:55:34 +0000

“You’re not building atop an open-source framework”

Should be replaced with: “You’re not using the best tool for the job.”

Who cares if it is open source or not, as long as it makes my life easier? Open source is fine and dandy, and more often than not a good alternative, but it is not a benchmark (if it is, then for bad documentation and developer / geek hubris).

By: chris

chris — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:46:17 +0000

@IllegalCharacter: Unfortunately I don’t for PHP. Maybe someone else reading here does?

By: Kia Kroas

Kia Kroas — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:11:58 +0000

I’m just a starting web programmer of a few years and at this point, I find it quicker (and more secure) to code my own framework and abstraction layer. The time it takes for me to set up a website from scratch would be less than the time it takes for me to read up on some frameworks and abstraction layers. Factor in the security considerations you have to keep in mind and times when you need to patch/update the code and you’ll see why it’s worth it to code your own IMO.

The thing is though, my work isn’t that advanced, so I don’t need the features in the big frameworks. Coding your own framework lets you utilize only the features you need and maximize the algorithms for that specific use. (Which I think some of the previous comments have already mentioned.) When the time it takes for me to learn the framework would be considerably longer than it takes for me to code my own, THEN I’ll start using them.

Code reuse is good, but reuse of bad code (or not knowing how/why the code works) is bad practice.