Today we woke up, realized it was Christmas Day, ran downstairs to unwrap our new train set ( just kidding ), and went back upstairs to write stuff for CodingExperiments.Com.

We added "Commenting your code" and "Saving your code to a web server" ( check sidebar ), welcomed a new editor ( i80and ) that just wrote the previous post. It is part of a series of posts that will talk about the Unix programming philosophy,

I propose to write a short series on various programming tips I learn as I go through various computer books.

Doug McIlroy, the inventor of UNIX pipes and one of the UNIX greats, said this about the Unix programming philosophy in The Bell System Technical Journal, "Unix Time-Sharing System Forward", 1978:

(i) Make each program do one thing well.  To do a new job, start afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.

(ii) Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown program.  Don’t clutter output with extraneous information.  Avoid stringently coumunar or binary input formats.  Don’t insist on interactive input.

(iii) Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks.  Don’t hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.

(iv) Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you’re finished with them.

Later, he said this in A Quarter Century of Unix, by Peter H. Salus, ISBN 0-201-54777-5).

This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well.  Write programs to work together.  Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

This is another obvious tip for programmers. However, this is another tip that I have experienced recently. A few weeks back, I deleted about five lines of code that WordPress wrote into my .htaccess file. For those of you that have had experience with modifying permalinks in WordPress, you will know that the for url-redirection are in there. All of a sudden, my links stop working.

I knew what was going on immediately, but I took a lot of time to fix it as I was working on several other projects at the time. I am happy to say that today I finally fixed the problem.

Merry Christmas. :D

Commenting your code is very important. Everybody knows that they should, but how many people actually do it? When I’m trying to fix a WordPress syntax highlighter plugin, there are no comments in it to guide me. I have no experience writing WordPress plugins, so without the comments, I don’t know what to fix. That’s why I’m working to learn how to use the Worpdress API so I can write my own syntax highlighting plugin. With comments, the lives of other people are easier.

Just a reminder.

Well, we’re welcoming a new person on board, voyagerfan5761. He loves editing Wikipedia, so he’s editor of the blog part of this site. That means he can catch all my typos.

I’ll let him use his editing capabilities to append his own message here.

—–

Voyagerfan5761 here! I run my own blog, but that doesn’t give me many editing opportunities, so I’ve signed up here as the sort of editor-in-chief you might say. Some things I can’t fix, like the site name and tag line, but I’ll be fixing possible248′s mistakes whenever I see any.

You can find me all over the Web, most actively at my blog, Twitter, and Wikipedia.

This might have happened to some of you using Windows. If you double click on the empty gray area of the WIndows Task Manager goes from the normal mode:

( Source; Wikimedia )

To the "Tiny footprint" mode:

( Source: ImageShack )

To me, having such a feature that can be turned on accidentally like that without having any note of it in the application itself doesn’t seem that good of an idea to me. Of course, I should have checked Microsoft’s Help and Support much earlier.