I have just spent the best part of my Sunday fixing a bug that turned out being a seemingly-trivial two-liner. Such unpleasant experiences are all too frequent, and weight a lot on my view of code design.
I call code design the process of designing …
There are many libraries around to specify what I call a ‘signature’ for an object, in other words a list of attributes that define its parameter set. I have heavily used Enthought’s Traits library for this purpose, but the concept is fairly general and can be …
Decoration is a fantastic pattern in Python that allows for very light-weight metaprograming with functions rather than objects (see this article for an in-depth discussion). However, when decorating, it is very easy to break another great feature of the language: its reflectivity and its ability to do static representations of …
I find that in object oriented design, there are two kinds of objects:
When I started working in my new field (data analysis of functional brain images), I was surprised to find in our data-analysis scripts what I thought was a very particular code smell: the numerical code is always doing a lot of filename and path manipulation, loading and saving data even …
I have been struggling for the last few days trying to understand the issues behind packaging and installing the Enthought Tool Suite. I think have been making progress, though only in my head, no actual code or packages so far are terribly satisfying.
If you are developing a …
I have been reading an article about a new language paradigm (Erasmus, a modular language for concurrent programming). The authors discuss the limitations of objects in terms of modularity. To sum up their point (and most probably distort it completely), the limitations with objects comes from the fact that you …
I just wanted to echo a very good blog post about usability:
Users are busy not stupid.
As you design something, ask “is this relevant to what people are trying to do?” rather than “is this confusing?” […] It doesn’t matter whether people could figure something out. It matters whether …
