Three interesting refrains of Coders at Work

Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming is one of my favorite books about programming as mentioned in my 2012 book list and my post insights from Coders at Work.

Ben Kuhn, currently CTO of Wave, extracted three things that nearly every person interviewed agreed on:

  1. The importance of unpacking abstractions
  2. Code is written to be read
  3. Rewriting for simplicity
— April 17, 2022

Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No

Use what you like, but I’ve never embraced the trend of programming font ligatures – they just look weird to me and I find them hard to read.

You can make the same argument against the Markdown processing used by this website’s software. It makes mistakes, too, resulting in inappropriate quotation marks and apostrophes.

— April 17, 2022

Do You Want a Boring Floor Lamp or an Ugly Floor Lamp?

Turns out floor lamps are a difficult engineering problem, and the top of the market (which the rest copies) doesn’t need good floor lamps, because the rich invest in hanging lamps and sconces.

— April 17, 2022