I’ve been writing a lot of perl recently, and had a few solid insights into what it means to program better than a beginner. Not like a professional, but not like a beginner.
Writing to the interface has been huge to me. Writing to the interface, not changing the interface.
Slowly working out how to keep my functions free of side effects is another. Incredibly hard to do, it’s taken me years to grok what it means for a function to have a side effect and to discipline myself to write side effect free code. I’m not great at it, but I’m better than okay.
A really interesting way to learn about side effect free code is to start writing ruby. The ruby community really encourages tons of small methods on an object, and that starts training your intuition to understand how to make one method do only one thing, and chain things together.
I have so much improvement to do, though. I don’t feel like I really understand perl or ruby or C or Objective C at all. C, I’m getting closer with: understanding how pointers and the address of operator work was crucial, as was getting a mental image of what a type is in C (think of it as a way of indicating how much memory something needs).
On another topic, Uncle Bob’s been giving some really interesting talks recently about what the new programming paradigm might include, what direction programming should be taking. His recent interview on the pragmatic programmer’s podcast is well worth checking out.
Jam and Bees 