The Cafes » 2012 » July

I hate 1% problems. No this isn’t an OWS slogan. I’m thinking of those code issues that really aren’t a problem 99% of the time, but when they bite, they’re really hard to debug and they cause real pain. Several common cases in Java:

1. Using java.util.Date or java.util.Calendar instead of JodaTime.
2. Not specifying a Locale when doing language sensitive operations such as toLowerCase() and toUpperCase().
3. Not escaping strings passed to SQL, XML, HTML or other external formats.

What I hate most is that it’s really, really hard to convince other developers that these are problems they should take seriously. (more…)

Last week one of my colleagues hit me with an idea that was so obvious when he pointed it out I wondered why I hadn’t realized it before:

If you’re designing for reuse, you’re doing it wrong.

In 2012 the only code you should be writing is what’s needed for the immediate task at hand. Don’t design for reuse. Don’t consider reuse. Don’t waste one minute of your day making code reusable.
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