Gabe Roffman

As a reader of CFDJ, you're probably an experienced programmer. But what exactly is it that you do? What is programming? Bruce Eckel, in his excellent book Thinking in Java, offers this answer: "At one level, all of programming is about managing complexity." For many of us this answer resonates deeply. Arguments about which language is "best" miss the point - that programmers write programs, not benchmarks. And in the real world, the greatest challenge isn't to shave a few machine cycles off accomplishing a discrete task, but to build software that empowers users to do their work and (we hope) delights them in the process. Unfortunately, in this mission we have a foe. Recent studies reported in trade journals indicate that the percentage of large-scale software projects... (more)