Agile Otter Blog

I have had at least two people tell me that windows works very smoothly for them, and that it handles whatever they need to do with it. I've been programming since long before there was windows, and I have NEVER had that good experience. In my experience, it's always been true that windows slows down (clogs up) over time, requires additional software to keep it running acceptably, requires virus/spyware/adware protection, and that a BSOD is an uncommon but familiar experience to nearly all windows users (especially programmers). My best experience so far was my wife's computer several years ago. She bought antivirus sw and a mail program, never ran IE or Outlook. Used OpenOffice. Installed/uninstalled nearly nothing after that. Surfed. Emailed. Played PySol. It was good for a couple of years until I installed some dev software, after which it slowed down and got wonky. I learned to leave her computers alone! Recently, she converted another windows laptop to Ubuntu to ...

Names changed to protect the innocent: // Adds Sessions which fit in specified date-time range private void ReadSessions() {

It is a tempest in a teakettle, to be sure, but among the points of friction and discovery today was one about the use of the letter 'u' as a variable name. The case in point was a nice, small function, not much larger or more complex than this stupid example: public void Whatever() { User u = new User(); if (u.hasSomeAttribute()) { u.setSomeValue(); } } The focal point is the letter U as a variable name. Because of my involvement in a particular book project, I was summoned into the conversation and carried half of it for some time. I would rather see "user" than "u" because of my rules about pronounceable, grep-able names that don't require any mental mapping. That is my preference. Therefore, I can clearly NOT choose the variable name "u." I also have publicly stood by James Grenning's assertion that the length of a name should have some correlation with its scope...