impares in certificándome has been reading books and tutorials on Java and has come across generics that are important at compile time but not at run time. He wonders whether he should bother to learn about them, but as they form a significant part of any certification course he knows that he must know how and when to use them.
Javier Gutiérrez Chamorro (Guti) in Bitácora de Guti reminds us that not so long ago, it was logical for a programmer to think that the result of "Hola" + 10 was a number. Now it is difficult to predict the result: some languages give a compile error, others a run time error and still others return a result of "Hola10". Guti thinks that in 10 years time the situation with C and C++ will be the same as with assembler today. Although some programmers will remember a few basic principles, few will be able to create something useful with these languages.
JorgeBec in Ingenieria de Software gives us a link to Brad Appleton's Software Engineering Links page where a huge number of resources for software engineering can be found.
He also presents a slide of 16 critical software practices and wonders how many of us apply these in our daily work. [At the bottom of the slide are a number of bullet points referring to the practices. The last one, "Readily implemented", struck me as rather funny; anyone who has ever started a project attempting to follow these principles will know very soon into the project how difficult they are to implement in practice. All of the practices are good, like motherhood and apple pie, but the real world tends to make a mess of the best laid plans. Still, you have to try...]
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