This year, I'm going to sea

No, I'm not actually going anywhere :) But have you noticed that there is something wrong with the post's title? Still nothing? Let's give you another two examples:

    "that is read..."
    => "... by anyone"?
    "that is a red..."
    => "... pen"?
    "there is nothing interesting in following..."
    => "... you on Twitter"?
    "there is nothing interesting in the following..."
    => "... paragraph"?

You've probably already guessed that I'm trying to highlight the importance of correctly using articles in English texts (or talks). Moreover, add some commas where they don't belong or don't follow the English word order system - the result is that your reader's attention will be distracted by all the mistakes and it will be harder for him to read your post, maybe skipping it altogether in an extreme case. From my experience, there is a surprisingly high percentage of people ignoring, or maybe not being able to fully appreciate this finding. OK, OK, you will most probably find some mistakes in my texts too, but you can't say I'm not at least trying ;)

<scientificInsertion>
A scientist would probably explain this better, but a human brain works as a kind of associative map, or a "pattern matcher", which, more or less willingly, tries to guess what comes next from the continuous input it receives. And it needs to throw away and reevaluate its conclusions if you supply it with invalid inputs which don't match the "carved" neural paths. And of course, this reevaluation takes some precious amount of time when one wants to quickly and efficiently read an article, for instance.
</scientificInsertion>

In fact, most of the English grammar rules are basically very simple when compared with other languages. So let's not be lazy and start using at least the articles correctly today, so we don't put unwanted "mental barriers" between us and our reader / listener, so we both can enjoy the reading / conversation. For non-native English speakers, it is not always easy to choose the correct article, but in most cases it is better than not to use articles at all. To take something similar from the IT world, it's like ever postponing doing a code refactoring in a hope there will be a "mythical cleanup project phase" for it (I'll get to this topic in a later post, maybe...), possibly leaving the refactoring stuff to a teammate. As a result, you won't learn this important skill needed to become a better developer...

And what is your experience? Are you pissed off by some forum posts so that you would better skip their reading altogether, or are you an opposite who does truly enjoy reading such posts? :)

Eclipse Neon having Word wrap, say wow! ;)

All right, this is not the freshest piece of news (1+ year old), but who from regular developers like us has got enough time to play with "demo versions" ;) Anyway, in my opinion, having this "Word wrap" feature built-in is a good step forward. Look at Notepad, for example - even this minimalist editor offers you the word wrapping for ages already... :)

Of course, some may say you could always install and use the good old ahtik's plug-in, but mainly new adopters of the Eclipse IDE will be more happy that it is simply there, out-of-the-box.

I should maybe add that this feature is not perfect yet in some scenarios, but still, it "deserves the stripes". The latest information on this word wrapping topic can be seen at Stack Overflow (where else? ;)) - "Does eclipse have line wrap".

Foreword

Maybe you know the feeling of the need to write a not-that-private diary, to share your thoughts with someone, apart from "your only sane colleague from your work team", if you're lucky. So here it comes, yet another developer's blog... It nothing else, then it can make my English better.

Why the blog name "Programmed by Coincidence"? Well, I tried to think out a lot of different names, from the already-booked codeforpeople, favoritebytes or dontrepeatyourself, to still-free dryordie or kissanddry (footnote: someone quickly going to use them for their blog now, maybe? ;)). In the end, after letting my ideas settle down during a day, I came to programmedbycoincidence which I think "says it all" - it has got an IT word within, so nontechnical people will quickly run away, while also giving a small taste of irony, sarcasm, or whatever you'd call it. As experienced developers surely know, it points out a widespread bad programming practice. When one looks at it from one side, when someone starts to avoid this practice, he/she, with a dose of certainty, starts thinking about the code and its maintainability more, therefore also applying the good practices like DRY or KISS more. Finally, on a lighter note, we all are somewhat "programmed by coincidence", aren't we? ;)

So what am I to blog about in here? Not surprisingly, I'm going to write about interesting news and findings about my favorite programming tools, libraries, practices etc. These don't need to be interesting or likable to everyone, but well, that's life, isn't it. I will also probably share some criticisms on the various IT products, so that's why their authors, you should better get prepared... ;)

And yes, I do like using smileys :)