I read an article that sort of pissed me off. Cringely has been talking about Open Source again... (even mentioned Eclipse too!) and how there are different levels of open source (as he figures) and why. The thing that annoyed me was how he was talking about refactoring as terrible. I'll agree that refactoring for the sake of refactoring is wrong and can lead to problems, but there is a perfect reason for it. Not everyone is perfect. *gasp!* Well, maybe Cringely is perfect, but I know that I am not. I don't write code perfectly the first time. Sometimes I do need to go back, clean things up so that they run better, are easier to read, take a more direct route, etc.... To call refactoring "a programmer�s ego trip and nothing else" is a little too much if you ask me. Ah well. If he didn't piss me off in his article, I wouldn't be writting about it now, and maybe in the end that is what he wants.
I have just read some short stories by Philip K. Dick (only one L... *sigh*). Anyways, they
have been pretty good, even if short. I was reading another collection of various artists, and the
editor talked about how Dick "portrayed his usually lonely and struggling characters, struddling to
do better, almost always going worse". I think that this is accurate. I have read some of his
work before, but never grasped it... never liked it as much as I do now. He has written some
stories that have been made into movies like: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Imposer, Fantastic
Universe, and more recently Minority Report. I have to say that Minority report has the same basic
premise as the movie, while being totally different. There are so many cool "future" things in the
movie that are not in the book. But the elements are the same. He is definally a great of sci-fi.
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