The gift was "Beautiful Code". The book is quite different from other programming books in 2 ways, it was written by 38 lead programmers, and it doesn't teach you syntax and all that stuff. Instead the authors wrote chapters about how they tackled different projects and things like that. The analogy in the foreward section is that when architects or artist are in school, they're taught by showing others' work, such as paintings, different sorts of buildings. But the programming world doesn't have such thing. We're mostly taught how to do different things but not compared to someone else's code...
Maybe this will make more sense (paragraph from Foreword):
Time and again since that summer, I have heard people bemoan the fact that our profession doesn't teach students to see this. Architects are taught to look at buildings, and com-posers study one another's scores, but programmers—they look at each other's work only when there's a bug to fix; even then, they try to look at as little as possible. We tell students to use sensible variable names, introduce them to some basic design patterns, and then wonder why so much of what they write is so ugly.
1 comments:
Nice gift, much love for and from Google for sure! xD. That's an interesting quote. I think Seneca has done a pretty good job at teaching us to use some pretty typical variable names. For everyone I've worked with so far has had decent lines of readable code. Its the people that put the creativity in the wrong place that results in a mess! Art is often a mess but does not apply to programming in the same way.
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