Jos de Jong

A few months ago I did an astonishing discovery, namely how strong your solutions are shaped by the programming language you use, the language that lives in your head. The interesting thing is that I already knew this. But despite that, I hadn’t expected this to be so incredibly influencing until I saw such a clear case of this in my own work. The right tool for the right job First a short explanation of my programming background. I’ve experience with various Basics, C++, Java, Python, JavaScript, Matlab, and others. Experience with procedural languages, object oriented languages, prototypal languages. Strict and loosly typed languages. Compiled languages and scripting languages. Desktop, web, server, mobile. I have explored quite some corners of the programming universe, and the more I learn, the more I discover just how little I know…

Ask any programmer to the worst bug he ever encountered and you will very likely hear a terrible story concerning multithreading and data locks. Or maybe an issue around memory corruption or memory leakage. Two topics which are apparently hard to master for us programmers. The latter case, memory corruption, is becoming less and less of a problem, as most modern languages come with automatic memory management. Most people see this as a step forward: it saves us a lot of trouble and results in more robust applications. Multithreading on the other hand is seen as something obvious and essential. Even more, programming languages which don’t support multithreading are seen as inferior and immature.

This is a theme which pops up again and again at the software projects I am working on. I really liked this blog by Jeff Atwood in this regard, explaining all your app is, is a collection of tiny details. Software which has not taken care of details right can be extremely annoying, and vice versa, an application having its details right can be real joy to work with. This article explains the importance of paying attention to details in application development. This holds true for different different application levels. The article discusses this in two sections:

Welcome at my blog. I just installed it freshly using octopress. Like everybody, I’m very unique and have the world a lot of interesting things to tell ;-). So here we go.