Dear programming tool developers:
JSON is a program-to-program data transfer mechanism.
If you make users of your tool configure it using JSON files, it means you're placing your convenience over theirs.
Dave Thomas
6,347 posts
Programmer turned publisher (but mostly programmer)
- If you haven't seen it, here's the announcement: media.pragprog.com/newsletters/20… The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition, real soon now. A whole bunch of new content, a whole bunch of revised content, but no change to the common sense.
- "Code reuse is a myth, and most abstractions rot faster than they’re shared." from an upcoming book on Functional Programming in Elixir
- Replying to @pragdaveWhat's wrong with JSON for configuration? 1. no ability to comment things out 2. no trailing commas make maintaining lists more cumbersome 3. quotes around keys are just silly 4. no ability to inherit defaults
- Time to recognize the inevitable. The work "agile" is now dead—let's move on. pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/0…
- Switched from using the fancy JavaScript build tools back to using a simple Makefile. Not only is it now reliable, but I can actually reason about what it is doing, and adding one new resource format doesn't incur a day's worth of dependency negotiation.
- So, programmer pals. It seems like a lot of developers are great programmers, but at the same time are a bit shaky when it comes to some of fundamentals: stuff down at the machine and operating system level. If I did a course covering that stuff, would there be interest?
- Some folks talk about ending the day with a clean checkin. I'm increasingly finding it better to end with a failing test; it helps we regain context the next morning.
- Installing react, react-dom, and reason-scripts... + [email protected] + [email protected] + [email protected] added 1694 packages from 659 contributors and audited 32802 packages in 79.021s found 0 vulnerabilities *1694* packages. This Hello World test is *solid*
- I've been wanting to write a little about how practices from 50 years ago are influencing developers today. As an experiment, I'm starting a series over on Medium: medium.com/@pragdave/weir… Please let me know what you think.
- I'm so glad we could do this. The ebook of Programming Elixir ≥ 1.6 (yes, the latest version) is now free to students and teachers. pragprog.com/promotions
- I'm starting to explore Elixir's @AshFramework (ash-hq.org). It's a seriously impressive piece of work and looks like a well-thought out way of both modeling and exposing your domain. I'm going to spend a few days trying to model a subset of the PragProg backend;
- Pragdave 2.0—turning the page. pragdave.me/blog/2016/05/0…


