顶级程序员的心得 Coders at Work (II)

Coder

What they say about good programmer, interview, and design

My interpretation

Simon Peyton Jones

Haskell architect, MSR-Cambridge researcher

Beautiful Code: agrees with Tony Hoare that good code should obviously have no bugs, rather than having no obvious bugs.   but “looking at the bare code may not be enough,   it’s not a characteristic of beautiful code that you should be able to just look at the bare code and see why it’s right.   (AVL tree is one example)

漂亮的代码:

 像Tony Hoare 说的那样 –它们明显没有bug; 而不是没有明显的bug.

但是“漂亮”并不意味着看着源代码就能马上读懂。 例如 AVL 树, 光看代码你不懂为什么这些子树要转来转去。但是如果你理解了它的核心思想，看到它维护了这个不变量 (invariant) 从而保证 log 级的访问速度，你就会说，”啊，明显理当如此。”

Peter Norvig

In charge of Research at Google,  NASA.

Made fun of PowerPoint AutoContent Wizard

Advice to school:

Teach more on team work. “when I was in school, working as a team was called cheating”.

Successful programmer:

The bravado and willingness to “go ahead” with incomplete but essential info.

Interview:

I don’t like the trick puzzle questions.  It’s important to have someone that you can get along with.  More,  Can they technically do what they said they can do?   You really want to have people write code on the board.

XP, pair programming:

10% of the time is to share is important,  but if doing it most of the time, it won’t be as effective.

UML:

I never liked any of these UML-type of tools.  If you can’t do it in the language itself that’s a weakness of the language.

学校教育:

应该教更多的团队合作，“我上学的时候，团队合作被认为是作弊” (现在有些学校还是这样)。

成功的程序员:

他们更多的是“我只要懂得我需要的，就可以开始干活了”， 而不是“我得完全理解某个领域，才能开始”。

面试:

不喜欢用智力题目，要依赖于面对面的问答来判断这个应聘者是否能够和团队合得来，更重要的是，让他们在黑板上写代码，看看他们是否真的能“说到做到”。

XP, 结对编程:

10% 的时间用来交流是很重要的，但是如果大部分时间都用来结对，那效率不会太高。

UML:

我从来不喜欢这类工具，如果你不能在计算机语言中表达(UML 要表达的东西)， 那这是这种语言的弱点。

Guy Steele

Help created Common Lisp and Scheme, Emacs

Code writing:

When you are writing code you’re writing as much for human readers as for the computer.

If efficiency is important, I’ll often resort to a trick. And then I realize that will mislead a human.  And you have to comment it or do something to flag that, to make it more readable.

代码:

当你写代码的时候，你写给机器看，同时也写给人看。

如果效率很重要，我会用一些小技巧。 这些技巧会误导读代码的人，你得加上注释，或者类似的东西标注一下，让它更可读。