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Piss and Vinegar ...

on March 26, 2026

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Piss and vinegar makes for a lousy vinaigrette!

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What is Software Philosophy?

There are two sides to programming: the computer/logical and the human/artistic. Our education and work have mostly focused on the computer/logical side. In my over 50 years of programming I have rarely seen any explorations of the human/artistic side. I have taught some of that but to a limited degree. So I coined the term 'Software Philosophy' to label the human/artistic side of programming. These essays are going to explore and illuminate how much of programming isn't about logic. They may veer slightly into software architecture and efficiency and other areas but they will all be under the umbrella of software philosophy - thinking about your coding. If you are a competent coder then you will likely be interested in this. If you went to the Dunning-Kruger School of Programming, then you shouldn't even be in this profession. One cow-orker I knew, when I asked him why he used so many global variables said to me, "Globals are good!". These essays are not fo...

Some of the Dumbest Code

I have seen a fair amount of bad code (some even written by me!) in my 50+ years of software development. This example is a recent favorite. Note this is a snippet of a massive 500k line pile of spaghetti written by one madman. This is a call to the sub in question. Note that the two values are concatenated to one string with the odd separator of '>'. $course_year = $course . ' > ' . $year_description; my $temp = return_data_for_course_year( $dbh, $course_year, 'all_data'); And here is the opening to the sub. My comments are below. sub return_data_for_course_year { my ($dbh, $course_year, $release_status) = @_ ; if (@temp = split ('\s+\>\s+', $course_year)){ my $cnt = 0; foreach my $element (@temp) { $cnt++; if ($cnt == 1){ $course = $element; } if ($cnt == 2){ $year = $element; ...

Answers to the Software Philosophy Quiz

Answers to the Software Philosophy Quiz Please put feedback and comments on this blog so they don't get lost in other media. 1. When you are writing code who is the most important person you should be thinking about? The customer/user/manager/boss They never or rarely look at your code Yourself Have you ever worked on your own code after a long gap in time? I once worked on mine 10 years after I first wrote it. Boy, was I a dummy when I wrote it. You may be the maintainer or you may not. The Maintainer Write your code as if the maintainer is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live! 2. Other than comments what is the most important human/artistic aspect of code? Formatting There are auto-formatters. Readability Readability is a result of good coding. It is not an aspect of code. Names! There are dozens of different things to be named in code. And the computer doesn't give a shit about any ...

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