[PRL] Joel on Software - Making Wrong Code Look Wrong

[Paul A. Steckler]

> 1. Finishing this blog entry convinced me once again that blogs on the 
> average are stupid. This one continues to propagate the good old 
> anti-academic, anti-intellectual line of programming doesn't need more 
> than a dummy mind, and academic CS is for bozos.

No need, then, to point you to Joel's blog entries where he 

  - disses Lisp
  - makes sport of formal logic
  - dismisses the value of closures

Those might make you really mad!

> 5. I won't even touch exceptions. I haven't heard of Raymond Chen, but 
> the fact that he supports Joel's rant on exceptions immediately 
> disqualifies him as "the best programmer in the world". Exceptions are 
> necessary, useful, and good.

Well, Joel does have a point: exceptions can mess up your control flow
in non-obvious ways.  That's why Kwang Yi, and Leroy and Pottier
worked on analyses for tracking exceptions.

In my current project, we have some too-clever code that only returns
a meaningful value through an exception, and otherwise returns unit on
a normal return.  During a code review, I pointed this out as a misuse
of exceptions.  But we have lots of good uses of them, too.

-- Paul