50 things expected of developers

Games industry veteran Mike Acton gave talk/rant at GDC (Game Developers' Conference) 2019 where he listed 50 things he expects of developers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV5HArLYajE  This list was transcribed by Adam Johnson and posted here: https://adamj.eu/tech/2022/06/17/mike-actons-expectations-of-professional-software-engineers/ and I am copying it here for posterity.

I found this list useful as reference material; some of the items on this list do not apply to my job because I rarely do anything especially performance-oriented nowadays, and some of the items on the list are good to always have in mind but subject to the programmer's own judgement, on a case by case basis, whether they should be practiced or not.

Here it is:

The Deployable Design Document

Abstract

A need is identified and a solution is proposed for a novel set of software tools to facilitate the visual composition of technical software design documents as schematic diagrams consisting of predefined software components, and the automatic deployment of runnable software systems from such design documents.

On Microsoft "Visual" products

The logo from Visio version 1.0

This post is intended as support material for another post of mine; see michael.gr - The Deployable Design Document.

One day back in the early nineties, when people were using Windows 3.0 and programming with the Microsoft C/C++ Compiler, a colleague showed me a software design that for the first time he had done not on whiteboard, nor on paper, but on a computer screen, using a new drawing tool called Visio. 

Screenshots of Visio 1.0 running under Windows 3.1. Click to enlarge.

He showed me interconnected components laid out on a canvas, and as he moved one of the components, the drawing tool re-routed the lines to maintain the connections to other components. This meant that Visio was not just a pixel drawing utility like Microsoft Paint; it had some understanding of the structure of the information that was being displayed. 

On Visual Programming Languages

Logos of various visual programming languages

This post is intended as support material for another post of mine; see michael.gr - The Deployable Design Document.

The idea of creating software using visual tools has existed ever since the first aspiring programmer was bitterly disillusioned by discovering that programming almost exclusively entails writing lots of little text files containing nothing but boring and cryptic text.

On UML (oh, do not get me started)

The UML logo, by Object Management Group®, Inc. from uml.org; Public Domain.

This post is intended as support material for another post of mine; see michael.gr - The Deployable Design Document.

The Universal Modeling Language (UML) (Wikipedia) was intended to be a standard notation for expressing software designs, and to replace the multitude of ad-hoc notations that software architects have been using on various mediums such as whiteboard, paper, and general-purpose box-and-arrow diagram-drawing software. The idea was that by following a standard notation which prescribes a specific way of expressing each concept, every diagram would be readily and unambiguously understood by everyone.

It has miserably failed.

Common mistakes Dutchies make in the use of English

"Dutch Tongue" by michael.gr, based on the logo of The Rolling Stones and the flag of The Netherlands

The Dutch rank #1 in the world¹ in English-as-a-foreign language proficiency; however, there are certain mistakes in the use of English that the Dutch are somewhat prone to make due to peculiarities of the Dutch language. When this happens, some call it "Dutchlish". Here is a collection of common mistakes, (or examples of Dutchlish, if you wish,) that I collected over the course of several years of living in The Netherlands.

A Programming Language

"Coding Software Running On A Computer Monitor" by Scopio from NounProject.com

Abstract

My thoughts and notes on how I would like a new programming language to look like.

The goals of the language are:

• Simple and elegant. (So that it is suitable for the academia.)
• Expressive. (So that it is suitable for experienced programmers.)
• Consistent. (So that it is attractive to developer teams.)
• Guiding. (So that it promotes best practices.) 
• Fast. (So that it is suitable for high performance computing.)
• Lean. (So that it is suitable for resource-constrained computing.)

This is work-in-progress; It is bound to be heavily amended as time passes, especially if I try some new language, like Kotlin or Rust.

Summary of language characteristics

Why the majority is always wrong | Paul Rulkens | TEDxMaastricht

I knew I was definitely going to watch this one, from just the title. It turns out that he comes across a bit annoying due to attitude; nonetheless, the talk is definitely worth watching.

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle

Interestingly enough, in his code snippets he is using JavaScript, whereas one of my personal guiding principles is thou shalt not suffer an error to go undetected, which means that no scripting language should be used under any circumstances, for anything at all, by anyone, anywhere, ever. But I digress. Excellent presentation.

Bathyscaphe

The Bathyscaphe logo, a line drawing of bathyscaphe Trieste

by Mike Nakis, based on art found at bertrandpiccard.com

Abstract

This article introduces Bathyscaphe, an open-source java library that you can use to assert that your objects are immutable and/or thread-safe.

The problem

Programmers all over the world are embracing immutability more and more; however, mutation is still a thing, and in all likelihood will continue being a thing for as long as there will be programmers. In a world where both mutable and immutable objects exist side by side, there is often a need to ascertain that an object is of the immutable variety before proceeding to use it for certain purposes. For example, when an object is used as a key in a hash map, it better be immutable, or else the hash code of the key may change, causing the map to severely malfunction.

Furthermore, when an object is not immutable, there is often the need to ascertain that it is at least thread-safe before sharing it between threads, otherwise there will be race conditions, with catastrophic results.

Note that when any of the above goes wrong, it tends to be a bug which is very difficult to troubleshoot.