Jani Hartikainen

It seems traditionally programming is seen as an activity where you make the computer do what you want. You have some requirements for the program, and then you write code to make it do the thing. It’s a linear “one way” process which you repeat until the program works. But I don’t think it’s a linear one way progress, where you only insert things into the computer. Instead, it’s a feedback loop, where the programming language and the programming environment actively shapes your idea and…

One of the questions that I’ve wondered about is how do you choose how to decompose a program into smaller pieces? It always felt like this is largely something you do intuitively, based on experience. But I recently read an excellent article on Meir Lehman’s Laws of Software evolution, and something finally clicked: You can usually categorize code into two groups, stable (or specified) and evolutionary problems, and you can use these groupings to guide program decomposition. Lehman’s original…