Phil Wallach

In  Making Wrong Code Look Wrong Joel writes:
Even more subtle:
if (i != 0)
    foo(i);
In this case the code is 100% correct; it conforms to most coding conventions and there’s nothing wrong with it, but the fact that the single-statement body of the ifstatement is not enclosed in braces may be bugging you, because you might be […]

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What does it mean when the cost of supply (bandwidth, storage, processing speed) is effectively zero?  Does this change how businesses work?
It is easy to say yes, but I have an objection.  The caveat is that software is not free.  The problem is not even that software is expensive.  The problem is that good software […]

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Eric Meyer’s comments on Streamlining CSS sparked some further thoughts (always a good thing).
Eric was (unsurprisingly) talking about changing the standard (and therefore browser behaviour), which I had (also unsurprisingly) considered to be way beyond the scope of what I could consider.  My approach was therefore to focus on the build system, which was not only […]

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Why is CSS so hard?  It is verbose, repetitive and cumbersome.  At the heart of the matter, CSS has not been designed as a language.  As such, CSS has no ways to express things elegantly.  It is all hard coded from beginning to end.
I had been thinking about this for a while, and was considering […]

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