RE: A Dialogue

From: Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen

I would like to ask if there are any habits that the
eggheads have tried to teach you that you actually benefited from, or
did you just teach them how to do actual production code?

I try to learn what I can from everyone, and there are certainly concepts in
academic CS that make sense. There are many that don't, but there are some
that do. I love the idea of Design Patterns, for example, and I really
latched onto that concept. In fact, that's what I try to teach to when I am
teaching multi-platform architectures; there are really simple, basic
patterns that we use in all business application programming. For example,
nearly all of what business application programmers do can be broken down
into CRUD and QUERY applications - CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete)
handles all your maintenance and QUERY applications are your reports and
inquiries. If you write servers that can support those basic transaction
types, nearly all of your business logic is done and you can focus on your
user interface!

Which leads me to another excellent concept: MVC. Model-View-Controller is
one of the best design paradigms to hit the IT world, especially to an old
monolithic green screen dinosaur like me. It simply emphasizes the fact
that your user interface shouldn't have any idea how your business logic
works; if you adhere to that strategy, your work is always a lot easier in
the long run.

I am a code nurser myself, so I don't crank out thousand of lines of
code everyday, but those I do tend to work well in production :)

I USED to crank out thousands of lines of code a day, now I try to write
less lines, but make sure they're REALLY, REALLY good ones <grin>.

Joe