rachbowyer

Part of the way the Joel test works is to determine if companies value developers. Companies that will pay for developers to have their own offices are likely to treat them with respect. Companies that treat offices as status symbols and then deny them to developers are likely to treat developers with contempt.

The same applies to the "Do you use the best tools money can buy?" and "Do you have testers?" questions.

Re-reading the original Joel test, it is clear that Joel means quiet in the sense of free from interruptions.

There has been an ongoing debate on the benefits of having developers in separate offices for many years versus have developers in an open plan office. There are arguments in favour of both sides. Joel, however, has plumped for having developers in their own offices.

So in this case I believe that Joel's (opinionated) views remain as valid now as they did when he wrote them. After all, even though there have been improvements in noise cancelling headsets (and office etiquette now allows wearing them), it doesn't stop interruptions from other developers.

I believe this question is as valid today as it was in 2000. From the beginning of my career (in 1993) everyone company I have worked for has used source code control. Not to do so was even in 1993 a huge red flag. Sadly there were companies in 1993 and also today that don't.

The tools have got better in some ways and also worse (e.g. complexity of git). But before subversion there was cvs, rcs and visual source safe.

Yes, this is how it works in the UK. Basically you have to shop yourself, or if you were not the driver then the person who was driving, to the authorities. If you don't, then you have committed an offence. Presumably this approach does not work in the US due to the 5th amendment. And from the article it looks like other approaches that are being tried in the US are also unconstitutional.

Spot on! The code fails as the author has used nil? rather than empty? The recursive call is not from the tail position so tail call optimisation is not possible in any language.

If quicksort always takes the first element in the array as the pivot, then an array that is already sorted is the worst case.

If Quicksort worst case performance is a problem then use Introsort (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introsort), which the paper fails to mention.

For those people in London (England) interested in SICP in Clojure, we are running a monthly study group. Our google groups group is https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sicp-mailonline and the code is at https://github.com/MailOnline/sicp-mailonline (each person has their own branch).

We are just starting Chapter 3 and at the current rate of progress it will be at least a year before we have completed the entire book!

Anyone interested is welcome to join us :-)