Things that were not immediately obvious to me

It’s easy to go overboard when praising Apple’s design, but they do turn their attention to some pretty neat challenges.

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Today is Memorial Day in the United States. Memorial Day is a modification of an earlier day of commemoration, Decoration Day, which was in turn created to honor those Union soldiers who died in the American Civil War.

To present some context, consider that more than 600,000 American men at arms died in the Civil War. The population of the U.S. in 1865 was around 35 million. This means that the Civil War claimed about 1.7% of the population, or 1 out of every 59 people. (1 out of every 30 men.)

I was listening to AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” the other day. Fun little CD. And, you know – AC/DC: Rock and roll. Guitars and drums. Lots of songs about sex and touring. But there’s also this one track – “Ride On” – that isn’t like anything else I’ve heard them do. I quite liked it.

Those little surprises are probably the best thing about buying music by the album, instead of by the track.

There are three basic ways to learn a new framework (or new programming language). In roughly the order you should try them, and in increasing order of usefulness, they are:

• Reading documentation
• Reading code
• Writing code

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I was reading some iPhone docs last week – specifically, the Cocoa Fundamentals Guide, and I came across this remarkable statement:

Programming becomes largely an exercise in assembling the programmatic components that Cocoa provides along with the custom objects and code that define your program’s particular logic, then fitting the whole assemblage together.

Taken literally, this would make Cocoa one of the worst frameworks in the history of software. What a developer actually wants is a framework that makes programming (almost) entirely a matter of creating the raison d’etre of his product. Such a framework should require that only a minimum of time and effort be spent creating “boilerplate” functionality.

Apple’s quote claims that Cocoa offers quite the opposite experience; programming will be largely about mucking around with the framework, and only a minority of development time will be spent creating the “program’s particular logic”. Since no framework can make it easier to build the unique parts of a program, the quote can only be true if the framework is incredibly difficult to work with.

Fortunately, it appears that the docs are wrong.

Looking at a receipt the other day, I noticed that the combined state and local sales tax in my area (Silicon Valley) had reached 9.25%. Even as I type that, I find it hard to believe. It’s motivated me to write a brief piece illustrating just how much money the government takes out of your pocket.

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