Welcome friends and foes alike
Recently, I stumbled across Oliver Steele’s site and found his link to The Programmer’s Food Pyramid. Looking it over, I recognized the importance of most of the items there. Reading code, and reading about code of course. Writing code, how obvious. Revising code, okay, I had always lumped that one into the reading code and writing code blocks, but I could see how it could be considered a separate activity. Then, up there at the top, the one that made me think for a minute.
Writing about code.
I had never thought about that one before. But in seeing it there, it makes complete sense. It’s something I should have realized much earlier. It’s something I have always done when reading code. When I find a particularly dense piece of code, something that is far from being intuitive, how did I work it out, and understand it? I would go through it, line-by-line, instruction-by-instruction, and write out what it was doing, in plain English. I was writing about code, while reading it. But it was never a consistent thing, a tool only reserved for special occasions.
This blog is my attempt to change all that. If writing about code once in a great while has helped me in the past, what about writing about it far more often? Once or twice a week? Find some piece of code and analyze it. Tear it down, put it back together, and explain how I think it could be improved in the process. I have to think, it can’t hurt.
Though the blog title contains PHP, it only one of the languages I plan on writing about here. I’m the type who is always trying something new, so I plan on using this to write about everything I try. So expect that you might see some Java, C, C++, C#, Groovy, Ruby, and who knows what else.
Maybe my musings here will eventually help me become a better programmer, but even better, it might help someone else become a better programmer as well. Feel free to comment, criticize and debate. It can’t hurt, and it might just help.
Code, Revelation, Writing