OK, last Coders at Work post:
I spent a lot of time worrying about edge cases. That’s something I learned from Trenchard More and his array theory for APL. His contention was that if you took care of the edge cases then the stuff in the middle usually took care of itself. Well, he didn’t say it that way; I guess that’s the conclusion I draw from him… To turn it around, you want to design the specification of what’s in the middle in such a way that it naturally is also correct on the boundaries, rather than treating boundaries as special cases. —Guy Steele
Not only were they not used to thinking in terms of the impact or ramifications of changes; they to some extent didn’t even realize that that was an essential question to ask. To me the distinction is between people who understand what the questions are that you have to ask in doing larger-scale design and the people who for whatever reason don’t see those questions as well. —L Peter Deutsch
The thing that he said that made a profound effect on me was how important it is to measure things; that there’ll be times—maybe more times than you think—when your beliefs or intuitions just won’t be right, so measure things. Even sometimes measure things you don’t think you need to measure. —L Peter Deutsch
When I was at what I would consider the peak of my abilities, I had extremely trustworthy intuition. I would do things and they would just turn out right. —L Peter Deutsch
Another thing that Frank did, on other projects, was design reviews. He had the most scary design reviews and I actually carried that idea forward. People would quake in their boots at his design reviews. —Bernie Cosell
I do a design of the future version of the program. Knowing what I know now, this is how the program would have looked, now at the program level rather than at a subroutine level. Now when you go to fix a bug and you have a choice on how to fix it, fix it moving toward the better model. Don’t just fix it in the shortest way. Don’t just fix it in the way that fits, but move it toward the other model so that over several months instead of the program getting more and more mired in patches fixing up the stuff that was old and wrong, all the critical parts of the program all of a sudden look like they’re the new way of doing things. —Bernie Cosell
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