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Understanding Software

Understanding Software

By : Max Kanat-Alexander
3.8 (11)
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Understanding Software

Understanding Software

3.8 (11)
By: Max Kanat-Alexander

Overview of this book

In Understanding Software, Max Kanat-Alexander, Technical Lead for Code Health at Google, shows you how to bring simplicity back to computer programming. Max explains to you why programmers suck, and how to suck less as a programmer. There’s just too much complex stuff in the world. Complex stuff can’t be used, and it breaks too easily. Complexity is stupid. Simplicity is smart. Understanding Software covers many areas of programming, from how to write simple code to profound insights into programming, and then how to suck less at what you do! You'll discover the problems with software complexity, the root of its causes, and how to use simplicity to create great software. You'll examine debugging like you've never done before, and how to get a handle on being happy while working in teams. Max brings a selection of carefully crafted essays, thoughts, and advice about working and succeeding in the software industry, from his legendary blog Code Simplicity. Max has crafted forty-three essays which have the power to help you avoid complexity and embrace simplicity, so you can be a happier and more successful developer. Max's technical knowledge, insight, and kindness, has earned him code guru status, and his ideas will inspire you and help refresh your approach to the challenges of being a developer.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
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Free Chapter
1
Table of Contents
2
Understanding Software
3
Credits
4
About the Author
6
Customer Feedback
7
Foreword
15
Index

Chapter 7. When Is Backwards-Compatibility Not Worth It?

This title might seem a bit like a contradiction to the previous chapter…and of course, you really shouldn't break your API, if you can help it. But sometimes, maintaining backwards compatibility for any area of your application can lead to a point of diminishing returns. This applies to everything about a program, not just its API.

A great example of the backwards-compatibility problem is Perl. If you read the summaries of the perl5-porters mailing list, or if you're familiar with the history of the Perl internals in general, you'll have some idea of what I mean.

Perl is full of support for strange syntaxes that really, nobody should be using anymore. For example, in Perl, you're supposed to call methods on an object like $object->method(). But there's also a syntax called the "indirect object syntax" where you can do method $object. Not method($object) though – only the...

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