What are people's thoughts on multivariate testing?

For the unaware, multivariate testing is a means of improving web performance by testing a number of different variables on a test. It's something marketers love but I wanted to open things up and ask what IT people think about the fast growing discipline?

If any of you are familiar with print or direct mail advertising, it's kind of like a/b/c testing on steriods (ie with the ability to test multiple things at once all in the mix)

Sebastian

The following are some of the many cool NetBeans IDE 6.0 keyboard shortcuts that no programmer will be able to do without, once you know they're there. Not all of these are new in 6.0, some were there before, but deserve to be highlighted because often they're overlooked: Move/copy up/down. Press Ctrl-Shift-Up and the current selection is copied to the lines right above the current selection. Press Alt instead of Ctrl and it is moved instead of copied. Press Down instead of Up and the lines of code will be copied below the current selection, as below: Inplace rename. If you want to change a variable, method, or other item, of which more than one are used in your code, press Ctrl-R, and you will see that all instances of the item turn blue at the same time, as shown below. Now, when you change the selected item, all the other instances change at the same time, until you press Escape, at which point the inplace rename mode comes to an end.

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If you work on software in any capacity, at least skim this list. I encourage you to click through for greater detail on anything you're not familiar with, or that piques your interest.

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So, two different posts crossed my transom recently, that I felt I had to respond to. First, and most egregiously, there’s The Daily WTF’s Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To. Then there is this blog post on Why Functional Programming Doesn’t Catch On. I am of the opinion, having covered much of the computer industry one way or another, that there are no non-trivial, uninteresting problems. The reason is just this- any problem that is boring, trivial, and/or mechanical should be done by the computer. I mean, come on, people! We’re programmers. If anyone anywhere should be able to harness the power of computers to make our work easier, it should be us programmers- the ones harnessing the power of computers to make everyone else’s work easier! If programming sucks, it’s because we’re being incredible stupid. Five lines of code duplicated over and over again, just to set some UI properties? Dear gods, people. Hasn’t any heard of subroutines? Abstraction? How about straight up code generation, or maybe implementing a DSL? OK, maybe if you’re only replicating those five lines a couple of times it’s not worth the bother. But if you’re replicating (with minor variations) those same lines of code over and over again, it’s probably worth it to step back and consider how to abstract things.

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