Clean Code, by Robert C. Martin. A formative work used as gospel by some organisations, and for good reason: it’s a manifesto on what good code looks like, and removes contention over opinions on how things should be done. The book has a lot of great things to say, and I personally agree with the author and have learned some useful language for talking about code. However, in the context of strongly-typed functional programming (namely Haskell), there are some glaring inconsistencies between the book’s recommendations and the solutions it presents. Read more

People tend to be given models about how a particular concept works in a particular programming language, and use that understanding as the basis for how to understand the concept in general. This makes sense in the context of a particular framework or idea which has been ported to different languages. Once you have learned something in one language, it is easy to transfer the knowledge to another language. This process reinforces a particular mental model of how things work, and makes alternative interpretations harder to comprehend. Read more