City LifeCity LifeThe Right Age for Programming- May 30, 2005 I've noticed that the only people who talk much about age in the context of software development are people under 30 who are worried about losing their edge. I think that's a legitimate concern, partly for the reason it is a concern for mathematicians, and partly because as you get older you develop other interests. Silicon Valley in its heyday quite ruthlessly exploited the fact that young developers can be easily persuaded not to have a life. I know several people who really miss the...http://www.jroller.com/bobfoster/entry/the_right_age_for_programming Simply Generating Java- May 21, 2005 We're in an age where people talk about simplifying even as they complexify like crazy. What gets me, is the number of new packagesframeworksapisspecifications that spring full-grown from the breasts of their creators bristling with options, switches and parameters that are challenging to comprehend much less implement. There is a simple relationship between specs and implementations: if the former are bloated, so are the latter. One such piece of bloatware is JAXB, which generates Java from...http://www.jroller.com/bobfoster/entry/simply_generating_java State-based vs. Interaction-based vs. Dependency-based vs. Something Else- May 3, 2005 At Eric Rizzo's suggestion, I re-read Martin Fowler's Mocks Aren't Stubs article, in which Fowler explains that the difference between testing with stub vs. mock objects is really the difference between two testing styles: state-based vs. interaction-based. And by golly this time I understood it. State-based testing is: you have an object under test, call a method and test that the state of the object changed as expected. But what if the method takes other objects as arguments, and either...http://www.jroller.com/bobfoster/entry/state_based_vs_interaction_based |