Helltime for September 27
Announcer: Now for quick hits and commentary on software development topics from around the web, the EIP web-ring brings you the stigmatized spawn of a refactory, MoffDub, and Helltime!
- Daniel Jalkut has a post on his Red Sweater blog about masking failures in a system, and it echoes some of the biggest complaints against the Null Object Pattern. Fail as early as possible. Just make sure your error handling will log the exact line of code causing the problem.
- Interestingly enough, CrossTalk‘s September/October issue has some hidden flame bait in an article about static analyzers:
Embedded systems expert Jack G. Ganssle advocates doing inspections before testing because inspections are 20 times cheaper than writing tests: “It is just a waste of company resources to test first”
The rest of the article is wordy but makes the point that a good static analyzer is written for humans, and since certain problems are undecidable, an ideal tool will automate what it can and provide information for what it cannot and let the human review.
- Fellow WordPresser Luke Palmer is all philosophical as he considers what is the fundamental unit of a computer program. The assertion: programs are made of ideas.
Yes, this is true. It also sounds very ethereal. But it can be said about most things, can’t it? This isn’t to say that I agree with the original idea, that fundamentally, programs are made of instructions. I’m not so sure that the question even makes sense, but put my back against a wall and I’d say that programs are made of abstractions. There isn’t a line of code that people write today that isn’t aided by ignoring some underlying detail.
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