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!

• Hans Eric Gronlund gives an appetizing future look at a future Code H’yung about designing a logging framework. It’s either that or a component of Hydrocon, because I did logging on The Project exactly like Hans describes as the wrong way to do it.

  Then again, it is true that both Hans and I are behind the current thinking on this topic, which is logging as an Aspect in aspect-oriented programming. That still won’t stop me, though, because to learn the latest and greatest way to abstract a mundane detail, you have to know and live the pain of that detail first. Then again, I’m not a fan of the implicit mysticism of AOP; maybe I should implement my own AOP framework first.

• In an adventure in programming languages and semantics, Gian Perrone goes off to list all of the unique challenges that programmers face in designing and coding another programming language. I use the term “unique” freely; there is nothing unique about the crux of his point:
  

  You’re probably the person worst-equipped to make judgements about the usability of your own creation.

  That goes for me and nearly every other developer who isn’t dog-fooding. I found his seven points of advice to be a little more novel. Ironically, the final point about not being afraid to be the same was the most interesting. Nothing is worse than making something unique for the sake of being unique.

• The Code Buddy blog gives us four questions to ask ourselves before we fix that bug we have been assigned. The one I am most guilty of is not writing a unit test, and I am most guilty of this when the code I am fixing is not “my” or “our” codebase. The unit tests are usually so convoluted and un-thorough that it isn’t even worth the effort.

  I would like to add a question to the list: what else did I break?

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