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Tag Archives: Joel on Software

It’s not the dynamic dispatch!

Joel has decided to blame the use of dynamic dispatch for Ruby’s speed issues: Without knowing much about the implementation of Ruby, I would guess that the biggest issue is around late binding and especially duck typing, which prevents type inference or strong typing, which means that function calls will always be slow because you […]

Code Width

There’s a question on wrapping code at 80 columns in the Joel on Software Forum. Most of the time, when I see 80 columns as a standard it’s to enable easy printing of the code. However, in this day and age, why are you printing code? I print code occasionally when I need to read […]

Joel Spolsky’s Bionic Office

In the latest installment of Joel on Software, Joel talks about his new office. I like a lot of what he’s done with it. It’s largely the kind of space I’d design. I might or might not have private offices, now that I’m starting to buy into XP more, but I definitely like a lot […]

I knew it wasn’t all puppies and rainbows!

[Joel on Software][1], “[Local Optimization, or, The Trouble with Dell][2]” > Unfortunately, the dirty little secret about Dell is that all they have > really done is push the pain of inventory up to their suppliers and down > to their customers. Their suppliers end up building big warehouses right > next to the Dell […]

Joel still doesn’t get it

A couple days ago in [Joel on Software][1], Joel claimed that in order for it to make economic sense to develop a Macintosh product, you had to be able to sell *25 times as many* copies as you would a Windows product. **Bullshit.** First of all, you can’t just assume that the relative market sizes […]

Open Source Human Interface Design

Peter Trudelle, Shall We Dance? Ten Lessons Learned from Netscape’s Flirtation with Open Source UI Development (CHI 2002 – Getting to Know You) We wound up spending longer getting requirements in the form of bug reports, and doing design by accretion, backout and rework. Don’t let rushed coders drive things, design the product. [via Joel […]

Joel Climbs Into the Trunk

Joel is smoking the good stuff! Or is he drinking the purple stuff? Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software is actually claiming “.NET appears so far to be one of the most brilliant and productive development environments ever created.” He goes on to say “ASP.NET is as big a jump in productivity over ASP as […]

Joel gets it this time

In the latest installment of Joel on Software, Joel talks about the importance of design in software projects. In short, a small amount of up-front design work can result in massive savings down the line. If you don’t do that design work, not only do you wind up paying for it later, you wind up […]