barnaby

Agreed. My net total for LOC written in the past year is probably -700, because I've refactored so much verbose code.

I don't know how to count unit tests in such a metric though... because I took a code base from 2% code coverage to 70% and that meant writing something like 200 LOC in unit tests alone per day, even though the actual code being refactored under these tests diminished in size.

I use qUnit all the time because I wrote lots of jQuery plugins for everything that we do at my small startup. Then we have a QA team in India that are always clicking through the site and finding new bugs (they also have extensive selenium scripts that go through the whole site every night, but oddly enough none that run the unit tests... grr).

I've paid once and then just copied/pasted/modified ever since.

There should be a corresponding survey for where lawyers got their TOS/Privacy page text from. In my experience there are only 3 or 4 boilerplate pages and then some light customization (which I strongly suspect is done largely by interns and secretaries). That'll be a few hundred dollars, thank you.

That's a good thought experiment. I imagine we would very suddenly see an explosion of automation solutions for making engineers accomplish more with less time. We would also see an almost perfect eradication of most time-sinks in software development.

You couldn't pay me enough to _maintain_ that mess. Not even a unit test in sight if something breaks.

You're forgetting that when several thousand people access a site per second, even a 1kb difference means thousands of dollars of bandwidth cost and fractions of a second of download speed.... let alone 70KB of difference which would bankrupt your company and turn all of your users away.

We don't write HTML/JS/CSS by hand because it's fun, that's for sure. We focus on code-reuse and delayed loading plus AJAX (plus gzip, compress, CDN, cache, etc.) because the customer focuses on speed and the CEO focuses on the bottom line.

Fantastic! Thanks for doing this because some of our devs barely use SVN in my office and it would be great if they became more aware of the benefits of version control. I've used git on previous projects and love the distributed model, hopefully having this as a good reading option in our office will help improve us all.

I just got the CoffeeScript book in the mail an hour or two ago. It looks awesome! Can't wait to dive into some of these examples and play around!

WOO! Just came in the mail! Can't wait to read through it!

Not sure why someone would downvote that... but yes, there are also lots of Javascript answers that seem to follow the same trend.

I really like this trend of in-depth Stack-Overflow explanations... especially about Python because it helps me a lot. Keep up the good work.

Like many 'random Polish web apps' this one was among the top in its class. Poland has world-class software talent, please don't downplay it.

Moving to SF/NYC/Boston is really good advice. I moved to San Francisco from Rochester NY after running my own company there for a while. I had NO MONEY left, in fact I was way deep in debt. Surely people thought I was crazy but you know what, I wish I had moved sooner. I waited a year to move out here and I will never get that year of life back. Now, after being here 2 years I've paid off all my debts and have saved up a bit of money!

Don't delay, we have more job openings in the valley than we can find qualified programmers to fill. A full on workers shortage! Don't delay, move out here already, get a job, and be happy!

Just ordered it because I used coffeescript on a project with good results. But by the time I get it, read it, and write a review on Hacker news this post will no longer be on the front page. :'-( sad

Agreed. It's well worth ones time to learn various different deployment tools. Everybody on a team should either contribute to making the build process better, or at least be familiar with how it works because their code has to go through that process to get published.

Enough of a community that Google chose to let Django on App Engine, not Rails.

I disagree. Her writing style seemed to appeal to a lot of people even before she wrote about her crazy ideas.

I hate Ayn Rand because her ideology is unrealistic and dangerous. It leads many to the delusion that moochers are the poor and the communist, while leaving them blind to the moochers in capitalism (like Enron, or everyone who ever dealt with Mortgage Backed Securities).

I like the sounds of this service. Is it ready to use in at least a crude form before you hire a CTO?

Keep up the good work! I'm sure that despite the odd comments here you'll find someone to help :)

In a perfect world you would be correct. But answer me this:

How many Java backend engineers know how to unit test javascript, how to make modular templates (e.g. writing their own tags, or nesting/tiling their JSP's), how to systematically minify their code in production and use CDN's ... or even how to use any design patterns in Javascript?

+1 because once you remove all the embarrassingly bad syntax from javascript, and use only the good parts, the way coffeescript does, then you have one of the best languages on the market (minus step debugging and tooling support... but those are coming soon).

I started using it last month, on production code. I work as a Javascript programmer in an otherwise all-Java software shop. I come from a Python background. I really love it.

I have Vim all set up to auto-complete it, to syntax highlight, and to auto-compile whenever I save. The bad news is: No Eclipse plugins, no notepad++ plugins. etc. So the only other devs who can work on it are on Mac and Linux (which to be fair, half of my company are on Ubuntu, but there's that 1/3 of the company on Windows that just can't practically work on coffeescript code).

Cool! Wordpress are becoming part of the solution.

There's some good general observations in here. I remember tutoring a student who was really good (I'm sure that by now he's a better programmer than me) but who felt inadequate (enough so to get a tutor) because other people in the class were bragging about how they did certain tasks in just a few minutes while in reality spent hours on it... or just turned in crap. And it was that same kind of macho sentiment that the author talks about... except it intimidates a lot of guys as well.

Also, most of the people who are jerks about it, don't know just how much they don't know (because that one obscure Linux command is all they need to master to be CS gods, right) and they turn into that guy you fire because his code has no sense of industry best practices (seriously, why unit test like a mere mortal if you're a CS god who knows obscure Linux commands.... FIRED).

So take heart. You're probably a better programmer than you give yourself credit for (whether you're a guy or a girl), because everybody else is a worse programmer than they tell others they are.

Yeah, was in the middle of a design review here at the Apixio offices in San Mateo. It's an interesting feeling for sure.

I'm going to have to try this after work today because I've been thinking about doing something with geoNoSql.

Let me answer this as someone who writes non-brittle Javascript code on a 1 year old web app (e.g. I have more unit tests per LOC in my Javascript than most of the Java code that's in the underlying app. AND I run my test suite on all major browsers regularly).

Even if you write solid code, using good architecture, and thorough testing you will find that if it passes on FF then there's a 98% chance it also passes on Chrome and Opera... but maybe a 60% chance that it passes on IE8 (requiring HOURS of work to investigate and fix), and there's some abysmally low rate of success on IE9 from having run these tests against the Beta earlier (we don't plan to announce IE9 support for a while).

So while you are correct old cruft will have to go, brand new solid code shouldn't have to go as well... and that's unfortunately the consequence of IE9. :'-(

Mozilla actually run the unit tests of most major libraries as part of their regular test suite to make sure that the Internet will by-and-large still work on any new release. So I think the author has a valid point here, new browsers shouldn't break existing libraries this badly.

True. But what's even worse for your career is when you learn programming languages that don't need DI frameworks because that kind of clean separation is baked in (like Python) but then most jobs out there are Java :-(

It's a good book. Your library probably has it for free (SF library does, and the waiting list for it generally isn't too bad).

Wow, This was a pleaſure to read! This is the quinteſsential obſcure but captivating topic that nerds like us love. I'm impreſsed by the level of detail that was put into this.