| Connect jimfhall
Minnesota
Jim Hall is an open source software advocate and developer, best known for usability testing in GNOME and as the founder + project coordinator of FreeDOS. At work, Jim is CEO of Hallmentum, an IT executive consulting company that provides hands-on IT Leadership training, workshops, and coaching.
Authored Comments
I would add The Tao of Programming (1987) by Geoffrey James. It's a great little book with tons of gems about coding and culture. Written in the style of zen, it's both amusing and informative. I've quoted The Tao a few times in papers and articles.
A few quotes:
The wise programmer is told about Tao and follows it. The average programmer is told about Tao and searches for it. The foolish programmer is told about Tao and laughs at it.
If it were not for laughter, there would be no Tao.
And:
A program should follow the "Law of Least Astonishment". What is this law? It is simply that the program should always respond to the users in the way that least astonishes them.
I use different tools for different things. I grew up on emacs for programming, so I prefer to use emacs to write code. For my system work, I learned early in my system admin career to use vi, so it's just habit to edit system files (even small things like scripts in my bin) with vi.
But when I edit other things - like editing an HTML page or CSS file, hand crafting an SVG image, or writing a readme - I often bring up gedit on GNOME. It's a simple editor that does what I want, plus a few features like syntax based highlighting.
So I'm kind of all over on this one.