My name is Ben Rady, and I am a software craftsman.

In 333 B.C. Alexander the Great cut the Gordian Knot with his sword, breaking that symbol of ancient power and ushering in a new empire. Some IT managers feel that SOA will finally cut the great Gordian Knot of their tangled and tumultuous software systems. Will it?

In some sense we software developers are all too tolerant. We know there is no single “right” way to write software, and so we tolerate many different opinions and styles. In the industry at large, this is a good thing. But inside a project it’s chaos.

There was a query on the TDD mailing list about how to test drive aspects. Here is an edited version of my reply to that list.

Note: Updated 9/30/2007 to improve the graphs and to clarify the content.

A common objection to TDD is this; “We don’t have time to write so many tests. We don’t even have enough time to write features!”

Here’s why people who say this probably already have enough time in the (real) schedule, they just don’t know it yet.

I’m speaking on Aquarium this Monday night (Oct. 1st). Details are here. David Chelimsky will also be talking about new developments in RSpec and RBehave.

At the Dec. 3 Chirb meeting, the two of us are reprising our Agile 2007 tutorial Ruby’s Secret Sauce: Metaprogramming.

Please join us!

What is continuous testing? It’s turning the knob on Test Driven Development up to 11, by automatically running the tests on every save. This has profound effects on the way that TDD is applied, and is likely to make you a more efficient and productive programmer.

I’m doing a tutorial on aspect-oriented design principles with examples in Java and AspectJ at OOPSLA this year (October 21st). You can find a description here. I believe Friday, 9/14, is the last day for early, discounted registration, so sign up now!

A short presentation on the same subject can be found here.

This was posted originally to a mailing list, but is reproduced here essentially unchanged by request of a friend.

I frequently see code (written by others) that is completely double-spaced, heavily commented, loaded with many abbreviated or meaningless variable names, and hundreds of lines long. In order to read the function and understand what it’s doing, poor Tim must wear out a mouse, skip comments, and track the variables on paper. A “smarter” programmer could just load it into his head, I suppose, but not the simpleton who writes this email.

Advocates of graphical notations have long hoped we would reach the point were we only draw diagrams and don’t write textual code. There have even been a few visual programming environments that have come and gone over the years.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then why hasn’t this happened?