Back after the break#

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:50:17 +0000

If anyone reading this is presently as disillusioned with computing/hacking/coding as I was a few months ago, I cannot recommend Peter Seibel's "Coders at Work" highly enough.

Why my discontent? I don't trust anyone who elevates a programming practice (or indeed, almost anything else) to the status of a religion, and it seemed to me that "Test Driven Development" shares the important characteristics of UML, J2EE, pair programming, and "goto considered harmful" in that it promotes a high-ceremony dogma that is on the face of it really rather unlikely to save you time, on the professed basis mostly that it will make you a Better Person. And, presumably, get your reward in heaven.

But herein lies the problem. If you want to write stuff for a Unixoid platform right now, after discounting the really tedious heavyweight stuff like C and its variants your choice is basically Ruby. Or, at a pinch, Javascript. Common Lisp is - for all that I spent the last decade or so hacking on SBCL (more about that soon) - a platform not just a language, and a platform that nobody really wants to stand on; Perl is basically moribund; Python is dull and patronises its users (ESR likes it, which fits because he is also dull and patronising); the Schemes are fragmented and don't have momentum; and Java and C# - well, honestly they're out of the realms of everyday religion and straight into the flagellation: not my kink at all.

(Did I miss anyone?)

Anyway, Ruby is actually quite OK apart from the syntax (as a Lisper, I don't actually care what the syntax is, that it has one is the problem), it'll have acceptable performance in 1.9, and the lack of macros/programs-as-data is mostly - I don't say entirely, but mostly - made up for by a lexically succint notation for blocks, which do most of what you might want to do with them. (It's actually a minor source of amusement to me that Ruby folk are so mad keen on DSLs when they have to jury-rig them all into method syntax, but that's a story for another time). Anyway, if I can still remember my original point, I think it was that Ruby is currently the nearest thing around to a programming language that is both interesting and useful, but what about the TDD weenies?

So, back to Coders at Work. I bought it after it seeing that JWZ's interview had generated a certain amount of controversy with the unit testing dweebs, and reading it over the space of a couple of days I was immensely cheered to find that none of the other interviewees - interesting people, great hackers and luminaries among them - were blind adherents of that particular orthodoxy either. And, bizarre and pathetic as it sounds, that gave me the innoculation against TDD mind control that I thought I'd need in a group of Ruby programmers, so I have started (1) making some kind of an effort to get to the London Ruby Users Group meetings, (2) making a good-faith attempt to actually learn the language.

LRUG? Well, the first meeting was all about reinforcing the stereotype: a "Coding Dojo", or "what do you get if you try to scale pair programming". Answer is, you get mob programming: one active pair and ten to fifteen other onlookers. Which doesn't mean it wasn't thought-provoking , of course

The second meeting I turned up principally for the functional programming talk, which seemed to create quite a buzz in the pub (that's a good thing) and left me quite reassured that at least some part of the Ruby community "get it".

And learning the language? I'm writing a program. It has bits of Ruby, bits of Javascript, bits of audio coding (fairly noddy audio coding, as getting Ruby to run fast enough for anything more interesting looks like a challenge) and will eventually embed webkit. Yes, I'm writing an mp3 player/library manager, just on the basis that the downgrade from Amarok 1.4 to 2 in Debian has left me without a working music player that will export playlists to my phone, but that I already have a Twitter client. More on that as it progresses.

I'm never quite sure what "normal" is around here, but hacking-and-blogging service has been resumed.

[ posted a day later. But look what else I found since - Eleanor McHugh's On Agility rant. This is not exactly what I wanted to say about TDD and BDD, but it has themes I'm going to pick up on ]