Sunday, February 15, 2004

The Craftsman Series

I've been reading The Craftsman Series that are posted here. They're pretty interesting, especially for someone like me who has recently become a big-time convert to test-driven development.

5 comments:

  1. just a little problem with the url there you have a ']' at the end of it and it shouldn't be there ;)

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  2. Whoops! Sorry about that. It has been fixed.

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  3. I'm intrigued to know what you made of episode 13 where the aprentice "Micahs his Journeyman." (Aside: a phrase which kind of annoyed me. Possibly if I was as into science fiction books as Robert Martin apparently is I would understand the reference. Or maybe I'm not supposed to. It just seemed kind of pretentious. If he wants to write a sci fi novel, he should just do it... But I digress.)

    After all the suspense building I was slightly surprised when the journeymen thought (to use the vernacular popular with football [the UK kind, where you move the ball with your foot] coaches over here) that "The boy done good."

    My first thought when he moved from Jerry's clean, loosely coupled, highly portable text-based network protocol to a distributed object approach was that he'd walked straight into the classic trap: applying OO design techniques across a network boundary. Almost always a mistake. I assumed the apprentice was about to get the public humiliation he so richly deserved. And yet he is lauded for binding both client and server to a Java serialization format. Worse, if you go on to read the later episodes (which are at http://www.sdmagazine.com/columnists/martin/ by the way) he goes on to start sharing inheritance hierarchies across the remoting boundary.

    I felt they had pretty much lost the plot at this point. Am I alone?

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  4. I hadn't read that far. Yes, that is pretty stupid. But it's also not unexpected given the source - ivory tower types.

    Nonetheless, I found it a good example of test-first approach, regardless of your opinion of the particular architecture they chose.

    Damn, I have to get a good way to find out when someone adds a comment.

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  5. You might want to check for "Micah Martin" in order to understand the private joke...

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