Wednesday, June 25, 2008

robert zubek / blog :: Commentary on “A History of Erlang”

Very good summation of an Erlang program -- helps me to visualize it.

robert zubek / blog :: Commentary on “A History of Erlang”: "At a certain level, I always knew that Erlang was designed for programming telephone exchanges. But this paper really conveys the feel for what that means: huge collections of loosely coupled finite-state machines, all running in parallel, doing little bits of protocol validation here and there, but mostly staying dormant."

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Relying on getters and setters is mostly wrong, here's why and what to do instead

"Relying on getters and setters is mostly wrong, here's why and what to do instead" (Reddit)
"Mike Feathers has posted an exploration of some ideas about and misconceptions of TDD. I wish that more people were familiar this story that he mentions:
John Nolan, the CTO of a startup named Connextra [...] gave his developers a challenge: write OO code with no getters. Whenever possible, tell another object to do something rather than ask. In the process of doing this, they noticed that their code became supple and easy to change.
That's right: no getters. Well, Steve Freeman was amongst those developers and the rest is history. I think that there's actually a little bit missing from Michael's telling. I'll get to it at the end."

But then, some guy thought this whole idea sucked.