“Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” Winston Churchill, plagiarized Composer for PHP is much like democracy, except for there are no others. So I have always hated Composer, for many reasons. And my views on Composer are admittedly in stark contrast with many others […]
Author Archives: Mike Schinkel
Can your coding standards do this?
I am not a researcher so I don’t have the statistics to back up my assertions for the post, but I have mostly written programs for a living for over 25 years — in my opinion — there is one hugely important aspect of coding standards rarely discussed and that is: reproducability. “Reproducability” defined What […]
A better alternative to “return early” – PHP / WordPress edition
Yes, complex conditionals are worse. But there is a third, better way. And no, it does not involve GOTOs. Me This post is about a coding pattern I have never seen used by anyone else for writing guard clauses, especially when those guard clauses are complex. This pattern results in code that is significantly more […]
Pros and cons of leveraging Go types
Go is a great language — probably one of the best — but it is not without its warts. Let me illustrate one aspect of Go that is really useful, but also one of the issues that using that feature causes (aka an experience report.) Pro One of the many great features in Go is […]
The drawbacks of D.R.Y.
D.R.Y., or “Don’t Repeat Yourself” has become a mantra for developers in recent years to the level of becoming dogma. Unfortunately, as with most dogma, it is often viewed more of an absolute rule and less of a general guideline that often should be ignored. The opposite of D.R.Y. Since we have this nice cheesy […]
On Typing Strings in Go
One of the niftier aspects of programming in Go is you can create named types derived out of existing types. For example, let’s consider storing and passing a URL. Depending on their needs programmers get to choose either a string or a class to represent URLs in many others languages. Often times programmers will choose […]
Go’s unfortunate err != nil idiom
All-in-all, I am a big proponent of the errors-as-values approach to error handling in Go. I definitely agree with the general wisdom of handling errors when and where they occur, and not delegating them using exceptions. So this post is not about how many people find needed to handle errors through code an annoyance. To […]
How to explicitly declare that a struct implements an interface in Go
One of the things I love about Go and find to be a strong supporter of serendipitous interface standardization is Go’s implicitly declared interfaces. However, there are times you really, really want to explicitly declare an interface, such as when you have a larger interface and you want your IDE and/or the compiler to tell […]
In defense of “Syntactic Sugar”
One of my biggest career pet peeves as a software developer is when I see other developers derisively write “Well, that is just syntactic sugar“ in response to a proposal for improving a programming language. So today I want to write in defense of this often maligned underdog, and explain why syntactic sugar not only […]
What is Software Engineering?
“Software engineering is what happens to programming when you add time, and other programmers.” — @_rsc Tweeted by @davecheney