APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Category Archives: OOP
Reversing the polarity of the message flow
On receiving a message with a parameter, sometimes an object just reverses the sense of what just happened and sends another message to the parameter object with itself as the parameter of this message. That’s a pretty hard sentence to … Continue reading
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The Humpty-Dumpty Guide to OOP
Everybody knows that the best way to sound intellectual and demonstrate the superiority of your approach to that thing you do is to wrap it in a fancy-schmancy noun term. This works particularly well with a term that can be … Continue reading
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Contractually-obligated testing
About a billion years ago, Bertrand Meyer (he of Open-Closed Principle fame) introduced a programming language called Eiffel. It had a feature called Design by Contract, that let you define constraints that your program had to adhere to in execution. … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, code-level, OOP, TDD
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I use mocks and I’m happy with that
Both Kent Beck and Martin Fowler have said that they don’t use mock objects in their test-driven development. I do. I use them mostly for the sense described first in my BNR blog post on Mock Objects, namely to stand … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, OOP, TDD, TDiOSD
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On too much and too little
In the following text, remember that words like me or I are to be construed in the broadest possible terms. It’s easy to be comfortable with my current level of knowledge. Or perhaps it’s not the value, but the derivative … Continue reading
Inside-Out Apps
This article is based on a talk I gave at mdevcon 2014. The talk also included a specific example to demonstrate the approach, but was otherwise a presentation of the following argument. You probably read this blog because you write … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, MVC, OOP, ruby, software-engineering
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Messily Veneered C
A recap: we saw that Model-View-Controller started life as Thing-Model-View-Editor, a way of approaching problems to design Smalltalk user interfaces. As Smalltalk-80 drifted off from its ivory tower, many Smalltalkers were using and talking about MVC, although any kind of … Continue reading
The Objective-C protocol naming trifecta
Objective-C protocol names throughout history seem to fall into three distinct conventions: some are named after what a conforming object provides. Thus we have DBProperties, DBEntities, DBTypes and the like in Database Kit. others are named after what the object … Continue reading
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Missing Vital Content
After reading Moderately Valuable Cliché, reader Nicholas Levin got in touch to recommend that I look at the back of my Smalltalk-80 books. Here’s the blue one. The first book mentioned in “Other books in the … Series” is the … Continue reading
Moderately Valuable Cliché
In part 1 of the MVC story, I examined “Thing-Model-View-Editor”, a pattern[*] extracted by Trygve Reenskaug’s work in Smalltalk-76. By the time Smalltalk-80’s hot air balloon set sail from the ivory tower, there was already a structure called Model-View-Controller. Part … Continue reading
