It’s been a while since I posted anything here, so I’ve decided to find a topic to motivate me.
This post is the first in a series about my personal finance / budgeting system. I’m creating this for several reasons, one of course is to track my budget, but that’s not the main reason.
I’m building the application with an interesting architecture. I don’t think it’s novel, but it is new to me.
This is something that’s caught myself out over the years, and I’m sure a lot of other people have done the same. When writing code or documentation, or even an email we leave out details we think are “obvious”. What we don’t think of is our own specialist knowledge - the invisible knowledge we have of our environment, or our context.
These days I work on accounting software, but in addition to my software development degree many years ago I also started an accounting degree using my elective papers.
Inspired by this comparison of Swift and C# I’ve put together my own list of my favourite features of each language.
My day job is a .NET developer, and I know C# and its pitfalls quite well. I’ve been playing with Swift as soon as it was released.
Throughout these examples I’ll be concentrating on the syntax, I may leave some details unimplemented.
Nulls / Nils In Swift nil-valued objects are opt-in.
Since I’ve been spending more time on reddit I’ve been somewhat annoyed at how some subreddits hide conversations inside emoticon text, mostly because it takes so long to read with all the hovering.
Since Google didn’t bring up any leads, and the Reddit Enhancement Suite didn’t help, I created my own! Though when people find this they’ll probably tell me all about the much better solutions people have already made.
While F# is a first-class .NET 4 citizen it’s not really a first-class Visual Studio citizen, even in 2010. A lot of the application setup tools we have for C# aren’t present in F#.
I was recently making a quick and dirty tool in F# that needed some basic user settings, so I went with the ApplicationSettings infrastructure in .NET, as it’s the easiest way to implement this. In C# this is easy, the GUI designer writes the code for you.
