Random Bits 27-Jun-18

The problem with programmers as reviewers, and especially programmers that have been involved in the program for a while, is that they are kind of oblivious to the complexity. And lots of engineers are complexity junkies. Complexity is in many ways just evil. Complexity makes things harder to understand, harder to build, harder to debug, harder to evolve, harder to just about everything. And yet complexity is often much easier than simplicity. There’s that really famous Blaise Pascal letter, where he starts, “I apologize for this long letter. I didn’t have the time to make it any shorter.” And that’s really true. --James Gosling

Tokenizer I’ve posted my code for the first assignment. I’ve tried to exemplify what your code should be like The program emphasizes clarity first Brevity is also important as it adds to clarity The tests are as comprehensive as I could make them If they succeed, I can have considerable confidence that the program does what it is supposed to do The Javadoc speaks to the user of the class It hopefully says everything you need to know in order to use the class—and nothing more

StringTokenizer I suggested in the Tokenizer assignment that it would be a good idea to use StringTokenizer I guess I forgot to mention that it would also be a good idea to learn something about StringTokenizer first  Anyway, my implementation of the first assignment may not be perfect (Hi, Shan!), but it works for all the standard ASCII characters

Super Chicken I know of one person who came up with the solution In a few days I will “reveal all” You have one last chance to figure this out for yourself

Javadoc I’ve posted a web page with a list of Javadoc style points (taken from the little green book) Javadoc is written in HTML In case you don’t know any HTML, the same web page describes some of the most essential HTML tags

Recent news about Eclipse Eclipse is from IBM NetBeans/Forté/Sun Studio is from Sun Some people at Sun think the name “Eclipse” is a deliberate slur (overshadows the sun, etc.) Maybe it is Anyway, Eclipse is expected to become independent from IBM This is likely to lead to better support by Sun The name will probably change

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