Xiangyang Liu
has written a
great article
on how to write small and useful programs on the
Code Project
. I particularly like this passage:
"Like many people have said, programming is not an exact science, it is more like an art. To be successful in programming, you need a combination of talent, experience, persistence, and most of all, a lot of common sense. Speaking of common sense, I like the following Chinese idioms:
- Believing everything in books is worse than not reading any book.
- A teacher can only get a student started to learn, it is up to the student to finish the learning.
- Black cat or white cat, the one that catches mice is the good cat.
The above are just some common sense we should have. Many programmers and managers are bad because they don't use much common sense in their work. Solving programming problems is no different than solving other problems in life, you use whatever is available to you and there is no point in restricting yourself to some artificial patterns or popular technologies just to prove to others that you know them. I would prefer to attack the problem directly instead of spending a lot time and energy on abstractions/frameworks in order to fit the final solution into some well-known design pattern. One thing I hate when reading some textbook-like code is that almost all the methods call some other methods, it is very hard to find a method that actually does the real work. Don't get me wrong, abstraction has its use, that doesn't mean you must use it everywhere. In his Kong Fu movie, Bruce Lee teaches his students to hit the target directly instead of dancing around."