Blog harvest, October II

A great way to stay up to date with current musings and hypes of our industry is to follow other people’s blogs. We do this regularly – everybody scans his RSS feeds and roams the internet. But to have a pool of shared knowledge, we pick our favorite recent blog articles and usually write an email titled “blog harvest” to the rest of the company.

Then, the idea came up to replace the internal email by a public blog post. So here it is, the first entry of a new category called “blog harvests”. You’ll read more harvests in the future. They will be categorized and tagged appropriate and have the harvest icon nearby.

Second Blog harvest for October 2009

There are four main blog entries I want to share:

• 8 Signs your code sucks – Let’s assume we all read Martin Fowler’s classic “Refactoring” book, then these eight signs are a mere starter. But as the follow-up post indicates, it got quite a few people started and upset for the “comments are code smells” line. Well, we heartfully agree with the premise that comments are clutter and code should be the comment. /* TODO: Add a joke using comments here */
• ORMs are a thing of the past – Another opinion that might get in the way of hibernate fanboys. We’ve had our share of hibernate “experiences”. It’s a useful tool if you know how to use it – and when not to. Replies followed instantly, here are two noteworthy ones by Scot Mcphee and by Jens Schauder.
• The Case for Clojure – Clojure is functional programming on the Java VM (think LISP). Stay tuned for our own book review on this topic. You can argue that Clojure isn’t pure, though.
• Bad Programmers Create Jobs – As is already is a controversy harvesting, lets add some more, written by Mohammad Azam. Side note: Half of our work was initially created by “bad” programmers, so I think Mohammad hit the nail on the head. And remember that you’ve produced legacy code today.

Then there is a bit of (future) knowledge you shouldn’t miss:

• Monitor a Directory for Changes using Java – The upcoming Java7 will have very useful additions to the filesystem API.

That’s it for now. My harvest format has changed for the blog, i’ll evolve it further in the next months, Thanks for your attention, stay tuned.