Achut Reddy

Coding style means nothing to a compiler; it will happily accept any legal code, no matter how badly formatted. Not so for us humans. Our ability to read and understand a program written by another is extremely sensitive to format. Imagine trying to read this article if every letter was in a different font and each line randomly aligned. Clearly, format affects readability, and it is just as true for reading programs as for text. A consistent style also leads to lower maintenance costs by making it easier to debug and enhance the code. This is especially true for teams of programmers working on the same project, who must often read and edit each other's code. In this case, it is important that each team member follow not only a consistent style, but the same style. A common style also enables the development of automated tools to assist in program development, such a... (more)

Optimize it! by Intuitive Systems

Every chance I get, I lobby for performance tools for software developers, because performance tuning is hard. This is especially true in modern object-oriented languages like Java, as opposed to older languages like C where the programming model was much closer to the hardware model. Furthermore, performance can affect the user's perception of your software. Hence, for any serious software-development project it's critical to have good performance tools available to assist the tuning efforts. OptimizeIt 2.0 Professional from Intuitive Systems is one such tool. OptimizeIt claims ... (more)