Comment on Today's Noun is: Reticence by Ramon Leon

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:40:35 -0500

In fact, hardly ever, if at all! Options are better done by cascades, but I guess in lesser languages, that’s not an option.

Comment on Today's Noun is: Reticence by Pat Maddox

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 02:02:04 -0500

One of my favorite strategies when BDDing is to introduce a new object whenever I get stuck and am not sure how to proceed. Sometimes I’ll be working on a method and it’s just not obvious to me how to implement a part of it. At that point I create a mock with some reasonable method name and stub it to return whatever result I need. Then I can create a new class that implements the behavior I need.

When I first did this it felt pretty unnatural. One way it differed in particular from a more traditional mock approach is that I didn’t really discover the interface of this new object – in fact it almost always ends up different from the original stubbed method call. On the flip side when I ask what to do when an object doesn’t know how to do something it needs to, the answer is have it ask someone else who does know, and in OOP someone else who does know = another object.

I totally agree with considering whether a parameter object would be better than an options hash. Options hashes are fine when you’re just passing some parameters around, but if you’re doing conditionals, or parsing data, you’re into the realm of behavior and it’s probably a good idea to encapsulate it.

Nice post.

Just A Summary : Today's Noun is: Reticence

Comment on Today's Noun is: Reticence by Ramon Leon

Comment on Today's Noun is: Reticence by Pat Maddox