Comments for The Grimoire

Comment on Abandoning switch In Three (And A Bit) Steps by Owen

Owen — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 23:16:30 +0000

Yep. None of this is spectacularly novel, admittedly. The motivating force behind this post is having had to explain this series of refactorings to people in Freenode’s ##java three time (and then you automate).

Comment on Abandoning switch In Three (And A Bit) Steps by Angelo Genovese

Angelo Genovese — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 20:35:21 +0000

Nice writeup, there are some similar ones in Martin Fowler’s refactoring book.

Comment on God Money, I’ll do anything for you by Taavi Burns

Taavi Burns — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:39:48 +0000

This is kind of like how str_split() behaves:


var_dump(str_split('ab')); // array('a','b')
var_dump(str_split('a'));  // array('a')
var_dump(str_split(''));   // array('') ?? WTF ??

Comment on Singled Out by larry

larry — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:18:58 +0000

yup :)

Comment on Singled Out by The Grimoire » Singling Out to Spring

The Grimoire » Singling Out to Spring — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:44:19 +0000

[...] Last time, I wrote about why Singletons get a bad rap, and I wrote some high-level advice for moving away from them sanely. I want to cover a practical (if somewhat idealistic) example using Java and Spring to move a Singleton creation dependency out of a class. First, a quick terminology aside. The term “Singleton” is actually drawn from set theory, where it means “a set with only one element”. The set of integers that equal 5 is a singleton. The analogy is that types (which are sets of values) that are Singletons also only have one value (the Singleton instance). This has caused a bit of confusion. [...]

Comment on Automatic Code Formatting and Merges by Kit

Kit — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:45:49 +0000

I’ve come across this like burning with shared python files and a group that disagreed on tab v. spaces. Also, on a shared TeX document, where people had differing attitudes towards linebreaks in the middle of paragraphs.

Comment on Nobody Cares About Your Makefile by Rudolf Olah

Rudolf Olah — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 05:55:09 +0000

You should check out SCons if you want a replacement for GNU Make. It’s Python, reads well and does a lot of things magically (with lots of room for configuration when the defaults aren’t good enough).

Comment on Nobody Cares About Your Makefile by Owen

Owen — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 04:51:19 +0000

@Plouj: …crud, you’re right. I even recall reminding myself to fix that when I was writing the post. It’s fixed now.

Comment on Nobody Cares About Your Makefile by Plouj

Plouj — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:35:28 +0000

Shouldn’t those include lines be #include “logging.h” and not #include “example-1.h”?

Comment on Nobody Cares About Your Makefile by Owen

Owen — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 07:19:44 +0000

@jsled, @Michael S.: Make’s biggest problem is not Make, but the languages it was built to work with. C (and to a lesser extent, Fortran) are not well-suited to static analysis. Figuring out if a given symbol exists in a complete C program involves running the preprocessor - and people have written Turing machines for it, proving that it can compute completely arbitrary things in arbitrary time.

Most newer languages have some sort of easy-to-detect dependency information. Java’s classfile format makes references to other classes very obvious in the constant pool, and the source format is relatively easy to parse. Ruby and Python both have hookable module systems: PyUnit takes advantage of this to “roll back” any imports that happen during test evaluation, but you could just as easily hook it to log the dependencies that are actually used during a test run.

Even Objective-C (and gcc, incidentaly) has #import, which is a step in the right direction: it describes what the author wants to do (use a given library) rather than how to do it (paste this source file here).