Under Development

Posted on 8 Sep 2009 at 14:51

The book is out of print, but I'd recommend trying to get hold of a copy, even if you're not a programmer or have no ambition ever to write a line of code. It's not a technical book; you don't need to know any programming language to understand what's being said, and you'll get a feel for how the applications you use every day came into existence.

More Joel on Software is a set of extracts from Joel Spolsky's blog site, Joel On Software. Spolsky is a bright, witty and opinionated writer and, while I don't agree with everything he says, books like this are thought-provoking on both a technical and a business level.

Spolsky once worked for Gates at Microsoft and had the title of program manager on the Excel development team. He tells of how he had a specification review meeting headed by Gates:

"In my BillG review meeting, the whole reporting hierarchy was there along with their cousins, sisters and aunts and a person...whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the f*** count the better. I thought about how strange it was that he had two legs, two arms, one head, etc - almost exactly like a regular human being."

Later, in a piece entitled Making Wrong Code Look Wrong (in other words, how to make coding errors stand out) Spolsky describes the correct use of Simonyi's Hungarian notation and how, in Microsoft (among other places), it became corrupted and abused by misunderstanding what Simonyi meant by TYPE (as in data type) - it was, according to Spolsky, finally discredited and banned because of the side effects of that corruption.

If you're at all interested in computers (why else are you reading this?) I'd be highly surprised if you didn't enjoy this book and gain some enlightenment from it.

Egg Head

Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg is a classic true tale of how he tracked down a hacker using his university's computer as a gateway to cracking military and other supposedly secure data facilities. Like Programmers at Work, it's an old book but highly readable, with lessons that are still relevant today.

While checking Amazon's second-hand books, I was confused that you can buy Cuckoo's Egg from many sellers for as little as a quid, yet Programmers At Work was no cheaper than £18 and someone was even asking £85. Maybe I should list my copy to help pay for the holiday.

Dave Five Bellies just passed by and said hi. Clearly the credit crunch hasn't hit him very hard. Two years ago, the belly count was down to three but now it really should be raised to seven. He looks as if he's expecting quins. Dave tells me we now have WiFi or, en Fran?ais, wee-fee onsite, so I can send in my copy and check email without having to go to the bar to make a connection. Hang on, there's a logic flaw there somewhere. I'll have to find a new excuse now.

Author: David Robinson

1 2