Thursday, June 14, 2012

Just because dot-driven development returns a function, doesn't mean that function does anything useful.

If only our manager was OO I could ask the IDE to provide appropriate functions to call.

I love the phrase dot-driven development.  Not because I think it's sad that developers might not know their language of choice inside out and have to rely on the IDE, but because programming has evolved over the years, and a bit of dot-driven makes it possible to code in multiple languages, particularly when they're similar (ahem, Java and C#), but have slight variations on function names.  You know what it does and what it's probably called, but it would be painful to have to dig around on line or in documentation to verify every single method call.

Ploeh Blog in Design Patterns Across Paradigms states, "As Phil Trelford kindly pointed out at GOTO Copenhagen 2012, OOD is often characterized by 'dot-driven development.' What does that mean? It means that given a variable, we can often just enter ".", and our IDE is going to give us a list of methods we can call on the object..."

Title: Just because dot-driven development returns a function, doesn't mean that function does anything useful.
Snrky: If only our manager was OO I could ask the IDE to provide appropriate functions to call.

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