“It’s not broken, it just doesn’t do anything.” That’s the lesson I’ve learned writing software at my current job. Plus, I like that the brevity of this observation doesn’t leave room for software that actually works.
Speaking of things that break, I’ve been working with the Mambo content management system lately and I’ve found that the more things a particular piece of software is supposed to do, the more things there are that can go haywire. My solution? Write software that will do zero things, duh.
So far the one plug-in I’ve gotten to work for it is the ever-popular “Hello world” app. Hello World is a great piece of code to get started on because it only does one thing — print out “Hello world” — so there’s only one thing can go wrong.
Is there a web site where I can find all the “Hello World” code I’ll ever need? For some reason, yes: helloworld.org. Even if you can’t count on anything else in this world, seems you can always count on “Hello World”.