I Built His Cage

Announcer: Now for quick hits and commentary on software development topics from around the web, the EIP web-ring brings you the stigmatized spawn of a refactory, MoffDub, and Helltime!

• Tone from the Authentic Battle Damage blog trusts no one, and neither do I.

  The points made in that post are right on: users don’t know what they want and they even don’t know their own business. Domain-driven design can alleviate some of the stress, but at its root, there is a fundamental divide between us and the users, just like the existential divide between the individual and other people.

  This attitude should extend to developing secure applications, too. So what you’re developing an internal app? How do you know your users won’t do something stupid by accident?

  On top of that, users don’t know what their ignorance can cost you. Before you know it, you’re being told that your product owner thinks that you think she is the enemy all because she changed half of the requirements in the middle of your sprint and then the product sponsors dumped all over your team’s “lack of progress” during the sprint review.

• Jeremy Manson’s blog has an interesting explanation of volatile variables and volatile arrays in Java. I admit that I had only ever heard of volatile variables in C. Being that it involves threads, my first impression is to run away to a higher-level abstraction.
• Architect S. Lott has a good exposition on the ways people fail to grok polymorphism:
  • Identification: people want to know what the actual class a references points to, a.k.a. instanceof. I’ve gotten fairly well at avoiding this in my own code, but this is the menu item of the day every day in our code at work.
  • Transmutation: people want to dynamically turn a reference to the superclass into a subclass reference. It’s funny that right when I read that, I thought “create a Factory with takes in a super class references and spits out the right subclass reference.” Wouldn’t you know that S. Lott had the same thought.
  • Denial: people always factor delegation over inheritance. Well, I’d say the Gang of Four is guilty of this one.

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