To agile, or not to agile

Two of my favorite authorities on programming disagree over agile. This is hardly surprising as they are Joel Spolsky and Robert Martin ("Uncle Bob"), both men known for their strong and well-supported opinions, and neither suffer fools gladly.

Great agile post - the product-shaped hole

A great agile post from Jeff Patton. Some of the best illustrative pictures ever.

LISP: There and Back Again

What a delightful essay on Clojure with more cognoscenti-revealing references than you can shake a stick at.

Speeding up Cygwin login

On Windows I use Cygwin extensively. So I open a lot of login shells. However these shells are sometimes slow to load, especially when my host is busy with other jobs.

While editing my ~/.bash_profile I noticed code like this:

if [ -d "some path element" ]; then
    PATH="some path element:$PATH"
fi

This is a common idiom. However, it is making a separate fork to /bin/test every time.

A simple improvement:

if [[ -d "some path element" ]]; then
    PATH="some path element:$PATH"
fi

A little trying it out and the verdict: Wow, big improvement.