What’s the single most important design guideline for the creation of high-quality software? For Scott Meyers, it’s all about interface design. That includes user interfaces, of course, but also APIs, i.e., class interfaces, function interfaces, template interfaces, etc. The guideline is simple: make interfaces easy to use correctly and hard ...

Haskellers have been isolating their side-effects from their pure code for decades, but most people write code in languages that allow ad hoc side-effects anywhere. In a lot of cases, these side-effects are practically a part of the public API -- they put restrictions the way the code can be ...