design

Guy Steele gives an excellent presentation on the importance of designing languages that grow. It's dated 1998, but it's still relevant today.

50 minute talk on video.google.com

Hacker News discussion

I recently bumped into a programming-related blog entry by Chad Austin, father of Sphere and a member of the IMVU team. Entitled 10 Pitfalls of Dirty Code, it first lists the ways code can turn sour:

• unclear or too many responsibilities,
• overly complicated or obscure control flow,
• concepts that don't map to the domain,
• too many dependencies,
• global state,
• or duplicated logic.

Then he goes on to list how bad code can bite you back: