- Jan 2023
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rhodesmill.org rhodesmill.org
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Hints for Preparing Documents Most documents go through several versions (always more than you expected) before they are finally finished. Accordingly, you should do whatever possible to make the job of changing them easy. First, when you do the purely mechanical operations of typing, type so subsequent editing will be easy. Start each sentence on a new line. Make lines short, and break lines at natural places, such as after commas and semicolons, rather than randomly. Since most people change documents by rewriting phrases and adding, deleting and rearranging sentences, these precautions simplify any editing you have to do later. — Brian W. Kernighan, 1974
—Brian W. Kernighan, 1974 “UNIX for Beginners” [PDF] as Bell Labs Technical Memorandum 74-1273-18 on 29 October 1974.
For easier editing and reuse of sentences, or even portions of lines of text, one can (and should) write sentences or sentence fragments on their own lines in digital contexts.
This way future edits or the ability to more easily cut and paste will far easier in addition to keeping your version control files simpler and easier to read and visually track your changes. (That is in many version control systems, instead of a change appearing to affect an entire paragraph, it will only show on the single line that was changed thereby making the change easier to see.)
This particular affordance may be a particularly useful one for note takers who expect to regularly reuse their notes in other contexts. Many forms of software (including Tex, LaTeX, and even markdown) will autowrap newlines so that a sentence broken up into clauses on multiple lines will properly wrap back into a proper looking single line when printed. Take care that in many Markdown versions adding two spaces at the end of a line will automatically create a newline in your text.
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- Jun 2021
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stackoverflow.com stackoverflow.com
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Programmers should be encouraged to understand what is correct, why it is correct, and then propagate.
new tag?:
- understand why it is correct
Tags
- combating widespread incorrectness/misconception by consistently doing it correctly
- spreading/propagating good ideas
- having a deep understanding of something
- programming: understand the language, don't fear it
- good advice
- programming languages: learning/understanding the subtleties
- annotation meta: may need new tag
- quotable
Annotators
URL
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- Feb 2021
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softwareengineering.stackexchange.com softwareengineering.stackexchange.com
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The more important point comes from a program design perspective. Here, "programming to an interface" means focusing your design on what the code is doing, not how it does it. This is a vital distinction that pushes your design towards correctness and flexibility.
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- Nov 2018
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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One thing Component taught me was to think of the entire system like an Object. Specifically, there is state that needs to be managed. So I suggest you think about -main as initializing your system state. Your system needs an http client, so initialize it before you do anything else
software design state on the outside, before anything else lessions from Component
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For the sweet spot you're looking for, I suggest being clear about if you're designing or developing. If you're designing and at the REPL, force yourself to step away with pen and paper after you've gotten some fast feedback.
designing vs developing!
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- Sep 2015
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blogs.law.harvard.edu blogs.law.harvard.edu
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Advice to software development interns
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