How we learn APIs [LWN.net]

How we learn APIs

Posted Mar 17, 2009 20:04 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: How we learn APIs by christian.convey
Parent article: Better than POSIX?

The only programming community I know that actually works as you suggest
is the Ada community, and that's because their systems tend to be 'system
fails, people die' sorts of embedded systems (or 'system fails, N-million-
dollar missile falls out of the sky'). That tends to breed paranoia and a
desire to actually know the damn standard before you write code.

Everywhere else, it's a minority who even know the standard *exists*, let
alone reference it regularly, and it's a very small minority who've
actually read the whole thing.

I, too, wish this was not true (I spend much too much of my time at work
cleaning up after these bozos), but I can see no useful way to fix it. In
a corporate setting mandatory code reviews with a flunk-too-often-and-
you're-fired rule might work, but I wouldn't want to work there: morale
would be appalling.

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How we learn APIs

Posted Mar 17, 2009 21:44 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

And there is a reason that critical code can be as much as 10 times as expensive as regular business code. Working that way (learning your standard by heart before starting to work) can be much more expensive than the usual corporate style of "write, then fix". On the other hand it is better to write correct code than to "write, then fix". There is a sweet spot somewhere in between.