Daily Archives:November 3rd, 2006

A UI puzzle

What do user-interface designers do to indicate function when everything becomes a button? I saw this on a train recently:

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I like the little icon. But for how many more generations will it be meaningful? And what will the little picture show after that? The mind boggles…

The dangers of clever programming

There’s often a temptation for coders to come up with the cleverest solution to a problem, one which accomplishes the greatest amount in the fewest lines of code, for example, or takes advantage of the most obscure features of the programming language. Such solutions may be intellectually very satisfying, but are often not ideal for other reasons. I really like this quote from Brian Kernighan, which I heard for the first time last week:

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser