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by Adam Green.
Original Post: Book Note: The Pragmatic Programmer
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When I started programming again this summer I was surprised by the amount of new jargon I encountered, such as refactoring, serialization, patterns, and model-view-controller. I was never a great coder, nor did I claim to be one, but I did have great coders working for me in the late Nineties, and none of them ever used these words. Where did all this stuff come from and what did it mean? It was little help reading most books on programming, because programmers by nature are not great at explaining their thoughts and assumptions. They may be smart and have great memories, but they rarely stop to consider the effect of their speech on others, and only in exceptional cases try to explain themselves in writing. This book is one of those rare exceptions. I now understand that refactoring means moving stuff around in your code, serialization means writing stuff down, patterns are common styles of organizing your code, and model-view-controller is just a style of programming that separates logic from data. I understand the desire to use jargon. Telling your boss that you are refactoring the serialization algorithm to use a model-view-controller pattern is much more impressive than saying you are moving stuff around so you can write to disk in a more modular fashion. Besides explaining much of the current crop of programming jargon, this book is a thoughtful examination of the way people program, not just what the write, but how they work at writing it. Normally I put a programming book aside once I feel comfortable with the content, but this is one book I hope to return to repeatedly. I just hope I don't find myself saying refactoring. Then again, when I started at Harvard I made an oath never to say discourse, and before long I found I couldn't help it.
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