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The scalability and breadth of usefulness of some tools in the software development world is huge. Relational databases spring to mind as one example — at the low end, a database as small as one table with a few dozen rows can be useful, while at the higher end millions or billions of rows in thousands of tables is not unusual, and you might choose the same technology for both. A more obvious exam

In Hillel Wayne’s post “I am disappointed by dynamic typing”, he expresses his sense that the Python ecosystem doesn’t really make the most of the possibilities that Python provides as a dynamically typed language. This is an important subject, since every Python program pays a very substantial set of costs for Python’s highly dynamic nature, such as poor run-time performance, and maintainability

I'm essentially a believer in You Aren't Gonna Need It – the principle that you should add features to your software – including generality and abstraction – when it becomes clear that you need them, and not before. However, there are some things which really are easier to do earlier than later, and where natural tendencies or a ruthless application of YAGNI might neglect them. This is my collecti

Over the past year or so, I've reluctantly come to the conclusion I need to leave Elm and migrate to some other language (most likely Bucklescript via philip2), and I definitely cannot recommend it to anyone else. This post is about my reasons for that, which are mostly about the way in which the leadership behave. I'm not going to talk about the good points of Elm as a technology. You can read th

Translations of this post (I can't vouch for their accuracy): Japanese Many systems boast of being ‘powerful’, and it sounds difficult to argue that this is a bad thing. Almost everyone who uses the word assumes that it is always a good thing. The thesis of this post is that in many cases we need less powerful languages and systems. Before I get going, there is very little original insight in this

I've written before about the somewhat doubtful advantages of Class-Based Views. Since then, I've done more work as a maintenance programmer on a Django project, and I've been reminded that library and framework design must take into account the fact that not all developers are experts. Even if you only hire the best, no-one can be an expert straight away. Thinking through things more from the per

I've found, contrary to what you sometimes read, that learning Python and Haskell has not improved my programming using other languages. Haskell in particular, being so different from imperative languages, is supposed to give new insights into programming that will help you even when you are not using the language. My current experience doesn't exactly tally with this, and here is why: Demotivatio