Quelques réflexions du PDG de Google

• Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
• Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
• Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
• Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_web_in_five_years.php

Programmons moins pour mieux coder

Un excellent article intemporel sur l"art de bien coder.

Programmons moins pour mieux coder. Toujours commencer par faire au plus court.. Et tant pis pour la beauté du code.

The fundamental nature of coding is that our task, as programmers, is to recognize that every decision we make is a trade-off. To be a master programmer is to understand the nature of these trade-offs, and be conscious of them in everything we write.

In coding, you have many dimensions in which you can rate code:

• Brevity of code
• Featurefulness
• Speed of execution
• Time spent coding
• Robustness
• Flexibility

Now, remember, these dimensions are all in opposition to one another. You can spend three days writing a routine which is really beautiful and fast, so you've gotten two of your dimensions up, but you've spent three days, so the "time spent coding" dimension is way down.

So, when is this worth it? How do we make these decisions? The answer turns out to be very sane, very simple, and also the one nobody, ever, listens to: Start with brevity. Increase the other dimensions as required by testing.