Becoming a Better Programmer

Epilogue

Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal, and yet if a melody has not reached its end, it has not reached its goal.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 92 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life-forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think computer programs are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has—or rather, had—a problem, which was this: most of the programmers on it wrote poor code pretty much all of the time, even when they were being paid to do a good job. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the education of  programmers, which is odd because on the whole the programmers didn’t want to be educated.

And so the problem remained; lots of the code produced was rubbish, and most of the users were miserable, even the ones who could write good computer programs.footnote::[With apologies to the late, great Douglas Adams.]

Well done: you got to the end of the book. That’s a lot of chapters digested. (If you just skipped here to ruin the ending for yourself: the butler did it. Now go back and read why.)

Over the last few hundred pages you’ve seen techniques for writing technically ...