Thu Oct 12 07:48:27 GMT 2006 From /weblog/design/interview

Pragmatic Programmer

*Dave Thomas*: You have to accept the fact that you're not going to get it right the first time. And you're not going to get it perfectly right the second or third time. You'll never get it perfectly right, but along the way you can get better and better . To do that, you have to discipline yourself to apply a reflective process to what you do.
*Bill Venners*: What do you mean by reflective process?
*Dave Thomas*: You always have to look back at what you did and ask, "How did I do that? Could I have done it better? Did I have to do it at all?" Get into the habit of doing that with everything you do. That way, you're consciously forcing yourself to reevaluate the way you do things.

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Thu Oct 12 07:47:11 GMT 2006 From /weblog/design/interview

Scott Meyers interview

I think a schism existed between the C++ community, which was still focused on language issues, and the other prominent development communities, which pretty much left the language alone. Java already had exceptions, but didn't have templates and had nothing like the STL. Yet the Java community focused on writing a whole bunch of libraries that everybody can assume will exist everywhere, libraries that will let you write applications really quickly. The end result is, we have templates in C++, but there's no way to write user interfaces or talk to databases. Java has no templates, but you can write user interfaces up the wazoo and you can talk to databases with no trouble at all.

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