What Are the Genuinely Useful Ideas In Programming?

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Computer Scientist Daniel Lemire has had an interesting discussion going on at his site about the ideas in software that are universally recognized as useful. 'Let me put it this way: if you were to meet a master of software programming, what are you absolutely sure he will recommend to a kid who wants to become a programmer?' Lemire's list currently includes structured programming; Unix and its corresponding philosophy; database transactions; the 'relational database;' the graphical user interface; software testing; the most basic data structures (the heap, the hash table, and trees) and a handful of basic algorithms such as quicksort; public-key encryption and cryptographic hashing; high-level programming and typing; and version control. 'Maybe you feel that functional and object-oriented programming are essential. Maybe you think that I should include complexity analysis, JavaScript, XML, or garbage collection. One can have endless debates but I am trying to narrow it down to an uncontroversial list.' Inspired by Lemire, Philip Reames has come up with his own list of 'Things every practicing software engineer should aim to know.'"

Comments

Re:databases

[reluctantjoiner]

Surely any programmer ought to know the underlying principles that make databases work (ie ACID etc) even if they never intend to go anywhere near multi threading. Even in single threaded programs knowing what and how ACID works can help. Have you never done a write() and wondered where the data you sent to disk went?

Perhaps the relational calculus might not be strictly necessary, however if knowing the theory behind relations helps engineers from naively treating databases as data garbage dumps, it'd be worth it.