cwash into software

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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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…)

Update: I cleaned up the example based on Rogerio’s comments.

Recently I stumbled onto JMockit and have been pretty impressed with the flexibility of the approach it takes.

Many mocking frameworks seem to take an elitist attitude toward testable code, not attempting to solve certain problems in favor of guiding one toward a more testable design. It appears JMockit is a response to this. (continue reading…)

As of JUnit 4.4, if you happen to peek into the distributed JAR you’ll notice something a little off: in addition to the org.junit.* packages there is this a funny-looking org.hamcrest.* package sticking out like a sore thumb. You may have seen other projects pick up a dependency on Hamcrest lately as well, and I bet you’re wondering what it is. Let’s get to the bottom of it. (continue reading…)