Viewing the world with mathematics
Otaku, Cedric's blog | Thoughts about software development
by Cedric
1y ago
I have a very complex relationship with math. I minored in math but I was really bad at it, and my classmates were regularly running rings around me. My mind was simply not a good fit for it. Then I switched to a computer science major, and everything changed. But even back then, I realized that math was special. It’s so much more painfully obvious to me now, but it took a while to get there. You might know the joke about this math student asking their math teacher “Will I ever use this in my life, ever??”. And the math teacher responding “Your smart and successful classmates will”. Such a sla ..read more
Visit website
It’s called Dependency “Injection” for a reason
Otaku, Cedric's blog | Thoughts about software development
by Cedric
2y ago
It’s fascinating to me that so many years after the concept of Dependency Injection (DI) became popular, so many people still don’t seem to understand what it is and why it’s such a fundamental idea that transcends languages. “I already have Dependency Injection, it’s called ‘passing parameters'” – Pretty much everyone in a discussion about Dependency Injection No, passing dependencies as parameters is not DI and it’s actually a terrible way of building software. Let’s explore why. Dependency Injection, the wrong way Let’s imagine a typical application that starts at main() and then ends up c ..read more
Visit website
What Kotlin could learn from Rust
Otaku, Cedric's blog | Thoughts about software development
by Cedric
2y ago
This is a follow up to my previous article, in which I explored a few aspects of Kotlin that Rust could learn from. This time, I am going to look at some features that I really enjoy in Rust and which I wish that Kotlin adopted. Before we begin, I’d like to reiterate that my point is not to start a language war between the two languages, nor am I trying to turn one language into the other. I spent careful time analyzing which features I want to discuss and automatically excluded features that make perfect sense for one language and would be absurd in the other. For example, it would be silly t ..read more
Visit website
What Rust could learn from Kotlin
Otaku, Cedric's blog | Thoughts about software development
by Cedric
2y ago
[Update: Part Two is up] When I started studying Rust, I didn’t expect to like it. Ever since I heard about it, many years ago, I’ve always had a tremendous amount of respect for the design philosophy and the goal that Rust was trying to achieve, all the while thinking this is not the language for me. When I switched from ten years of gruesome C++ to Java back in 1996, I realized that I was no longer interested in low level languages, especially languages that force me to care about memory. My brain is wired a certain way, and that way makes low level considerations, especially memory managem ..read more
Visit website
It’s called Dependency “Injection” for a reason
Otaku, Cedric's blog | Thoughts about software development
by Cedric
2y ago
It’s fascinating to me that so many years after the concept of Dependency Injection (DI) became popular, so many people still don’t seem to understand what it is and why it’s such a fundamental idea that transcends languages. “I already have Dependency Injection, it’s called ‘passing parameters'” – Pretty much everyone in a discussion about Dependency Injection No, passing dependencies as parameters is not DI and it’s actually a terrible way of building software. Let’s explore why. Dependency Injection, the wrong way Let’s imagine a typical application that starts at main() and then ends up c ..read more
Visit website
What Kotlin could learn from Rust
Otaku, Cedric's blog | Thoughts about software development
by Cedric
2y ago
This is a follow up to my previous article, in which I explored a few aspects of Kotlin that Rust could learn from. This time, I am going to look at some features that I really enjoy in Rust and which I wish that Kotlin adopted. Before we begin, I’d like to reiterate that my point is not to start a language war between the two languages, nor am I trying to turn one language into the other. I spent careful time analyzing which features I want to discuss and automatically excluded features that make perfect sense for one language and would be absurd in the other. For example, it would be silly t ..read more
Visit website
What Rust could learn from Kotlin
Otaku, Cedric's blog | Thoughts about software development
by Cedric
2y ago
When I started studying Rust, I didn’t expect to like it. Ever since I heard about it, many years ago, I’ve always had a tremendous amount of respect for the design philosophy and the goal that Rust was trying to achieve, all the while thinking this is not the language for me. When I switched from ten years of gruesome C++ to Java back in 1996, I realized that I was no longer interested in low level languages, especially languages that force me to care about memory. My brain is wired a certain way, and that way makes low level considerations, especially memory management, the kind of problem ..read more
Visit website
Refactoring a dynamically typed language: do it safely or automatically, but not both
Otaku, Cedric's blog | Thoughts about software development
by Cedric
2y ago
I was recently having a discussion about refactoring dynamically typed languages and I was struck by the amount of misconceptions that a lot of developers still have on this topic. I expressed my point in this article from fifteen years ago(!), not much has changed, but the idea that it it impossible to safely and automatically refactor a language that doesn’t have type annotations is still something that is not widely accepted, so I thought I would revisit my point and modernize the code a bit. First of all, my claim: In languages that do not have type annotations (e.g. Python, Ruby, Javascr ..read more
Visit website
Malware on my Android phone!
Otaku, Cedric's blog | Thoughts about software development
by Cedric
2y ago
I have a confession to make that I’m not very proud of: recently, I unwittingly installed malware on my Android phone. As one of the early members of the Android team and someone who’s been using Android for about thirteen years, this was a pretty humbling and irritating event. This is what happened. I remember how it started: I unlocked my phone and two accidental clicks led me to agree to a dialog that my brain immediately registered as suspicious. But I had other things on my mind at the time so I paid it no mind and moved on. The next day, I picked up my phone and when I launched Chrome ..read more
Visit website
Zoom background #23
Otaku, Cedric's blog | Thoughts about software development
by Cedric
2y ago
..read more
Visit website

Follow Otaku, Cedric's blog | Thoughts about software development on FeedSpot

Continue with Google
Continue with Apple
OR