Impromptus

On Ada Lovelace Day, one is encouraged to write about a great woman involved in computer science. That’s today, and I’ll take Barbara Liskov! She figured out what she, in her book “Program Development in Java”, modestly calls “the substitution principle”, but everyone else in the world calls “the Liskov substitution principle”. It’s an insight [...]

Comments in code that I have to edit, particularly comments at the beginning of a function or class, have exactly one purpose: convincing me that this code is important enough that I shouldn’t delete it. Tell me what the class does, tell me what the function does, and do it all in convincing enough language [...]