Problem Solving

So Lambda Island has this challenge of writing a blog post for every day of December until the 24th. I figure I’ll give it a shot.

This will most certainly be in the spirit of not letting perfect be the enemy of the good, so consider yourself warned.

What I want to mention briefly today is one of the less obvious ways that Clojure has helped me become a better programmer. If you’ve ever tried to encourage the Clojure core to implement your most favorite feature, you’ve most probably had the feeling of being shot down with these three questions:

1) What problem are you trying to solve 2) What are some approaches to solving this problem 3) What are the pros and cons of these solutions.

And you might feel a bit annoyed, since to you, the problem is obvious given your solution, and of course you’ve already figured out the best possible solution.

Lately, I’ve found myself being the annoying person always asking these three questions, and if nothing else, it teaches me a lot more about the problem to be solved, and it enables me to write better software when that time comes.

I guess this is closely related to The five whys

And that’s about it for today.