Prof. Cheriton, an Introduction

When I signed up for Prof. Cheriton's course, I assumed it would be a general purpose survey of current best practices in writing object-oriented software. In fact, as Cheriton explained, that was his original intent. However, like most experienced programmers, Cheriton has his own strong convictions about how software ought to be written. He does subscribe to the conventional wisdom of short development cycles, regular builds, and code conventions, but beyond that many of his ideas are more specific and make up his own methodology. He said that he was teaching us to write code as God intended code to be written, and although he laughed as he said it, it was clear he was serious enough -- that he considered his approach better than most.