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

[Matthias Felleisen]

On May 11, 2005, at 8:18 PM, Paul A. Steckler wrote:

>> 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!

One more point against blogs. What's -inf.0 - 1?

>> 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.

For all features, there exists a programmer who will abuse it.