It has come to my attention, both here on DIC and in the real world, that many programmers do not actually know that there is a difference between a switch statement and a string of if-else clauses. This seems worthy of correction. You may have been told at some point in your path to becoming a developer that a switch statement is "just like...

Everything in software is done wrong. This is because, by the time you know how to do it right, you've already done it. The only exception is when you do the same thing over and over - and that's a DRY violation, and so wrong by definition.

The postincrement (++) and postdecrement (--) operators (hereafter called "postinc" and "postdec") are a perennial source of befucklement for new and intermediate Java programmers. In particular, people get snagged on complex exp...

Pet peeve time: "code" in the software sense is a mass noun, not a collective noun. It has no plural. You don't eat "an oatmeal" or several "oatmeals", you eat oatmeal. In the same way, you don't write "a code" or "codes", you write code. If you mean a unified body of code that can be run...

Some Lessons Learned...