Discussion of "A Philosophy of Software Design"

Lecture Notes for CS 190
Winter 2020
John Ousterhout

• This class session will review and discuss the main ideas in A Philosophy of Software Design.
• Instructions for students:
  • Read Chapters 1-18 before class.
  • Think about your own experiences:
    • Have you experienced problems and/or solutions similar to those described in the book?
    • Have you received advice that contradicts the book?
• Deep and shallow classes
• Interface vs. implementation
• Abstraction
• Temporal design vs. information hiding
• Dependencies
• Make code obvious
• Tactical programming vs. strategic programming
• Define errors out of existence
• Comments
• Writing comments before code
• Choosing names
• What matters
• Design it twice
• Pull complexity downwards
• General-purpose vs. special-purpose
• Different layer, different abstraction
• Have you received other advice that contradicts the book?