cwash into software

The following scenario plays out a lot when I pair up with people, so I thought I’d distill it down and write it up for future reference. I think teaching lessons through scenarios could make for an interesting series of articles, and I’m sure others have equally interesting experiences to share.

I’ve tried to condense this down to just the steps vital to understanding the underlying problem (though this is certainly not the only way to get there) and introduce some terminology (providing links, even if deferring to google) along the way. I hope these help out aspiring or new developers.

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In a recent tech talk, I watched Miško Hevery propose an interesting challenge to his audience: start a toy project and try to write the code with no if-else or switch blocks at all. None at all?  Before thinking about how to do this, why would you want to do it in the first place?  On the surface, it may seem to the unassuming a bit counter-intuitive.  Comparison-based branching is at the heart of programming, and the concept of an if-else or switch block is almost universal, existing in most every programming language ever devised.  What’s Hevery’s agenda with this exercise – and what can possibly be gained from trying to write a program without branching entirely?

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I recently read Scott Leberknight’s “Can Java Be Saved?” with interest and started typing up a response.  As Scott’s article was a bit lengthy, so became the comments I had in response.  In excess of 1000 characters, which JRoller told me was spam when I finally tried to post it.  I’m still never surprised to see that happen to my writing.  Anyway, I’m probably just an oaf, but I didn’t see Scott’s e-mail listed anywhere on his site (probably another spam-deterrent choice) so I thought since I spent more than a few minutes on it, it’d be appropriate enough to post here and link it.  Sorry but I don’t have the energy to evolve this into a more formal post, perhaps I will at a later date.

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Back in April, there was an interesting article quoting Ron Jeffries et al on InfoQ looking at code reuse from an agile perspective. The conversation steered toward explaining reuse as a concern that is very expensive, looking at it from a top-down, “enterprise”-wide lens.

But is code reuse a black and white issue? My contention is there are varying degrees of reuse that are often neglected on a microscale within an even moderately-sized project. If the code you produce isn’t going to be reused, is it even going to be looked at? These are similar problems with similar solutions. (continue reading…)