"The only thing that will interpret Perl is a Perl interpreter" ... how those words rang in my ears this morning as I was writing some code to highlight source code comments in a different colour in our web site examples. The words were spoken by Larry Wall ... I think it was 10 years ago, so I may have paraphrased through the passage of time ... but when I was working on the site this morning, I came to realise again just how wise those words were. For the most part, the code I was working on works quite well - but there are a few examples where it doesn't - and it's interesting to note that those cases where it doesn't work are the Perl ones - with comments in languages like Lua being much cleaner in how the comments are identified.
I'm also looking back at my work, and thinking that I should have coded in a much more object oriented way, as what was intended to be just a short piece of code turned into something rather larger - and with so many conditions for different types of file that I now realise that I should have started with a base class, with files of exceptions for the derived classes. Perhaps I should use the extreme programming approach - take the work I did as a proof of concept, and refactor it.
(written 2010-11-21, updated 2010-12-04)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
Q907 - Object Orientation and General technical topics - Object Orientation: Design Techniques [80] OO - real benefits - (2004-10-09)
[236] Tapping in on resources - (2005-03-05)
[507] Introduction to Object Oriented Programming - (2005-11-27)
[534] Design - one name, one action - (2005-12-19)
[656] Think about your design even if you don't use full UML - (2006-03-24)
[747] The Fag Packet Design Methodology - (2006-06-06)
[831] Comparison of Object Oriented Philosophy - Python, Java, C++, Perl - (2006-08-13)
[836] Build on what you already have with OO - (2006-08-17)
[1047] Maintainable code - some positive advice - (2007-01-21)
[1217] What are factory and singleton classes? - (2007-06-04)
[1224] Object Relation Mapping (ORM) - (2007-06-09)
[1435] Object Oriented Programming in Perl - Course - (2007-11-18)
[1528] Object Oriented Tcl - (2008-02-02)
[1538] Teaching Object Oriented Java with Students and Ice Cream - (2008-02-12)
[2169] When should I use OO techniques? - (2009-05-11)
[2170] Designing a heirarcy of classes - getting inheritance right - (2009-05-11)
[2327] Planning! - (2009-08-08)
[2380] Object Oriented programming - a practical design example - (2009-08-27)
[2501] Simples - (2009-11-12)
[2523] Plan your application before you start - (2009-12-02)
[2717] The Multiple Inheritance Conundrum, interfaces and mixins - (2010-04-11)
[2741] What is a factory? - (2010-04-26)
[2747] Containment, Associative Objects, Inheritance, packages and modules - (2010-04-30)
[2785] The Light bulb moment when people see how Object Orientation works in real use - (2010-05-28)
[2865] Relationships between Java classes - inheritance, packaging and others - (2010-07-10)
[2878] Program for reliability and efficiency - do not duplicate, but rather share and re-use - (2010-07-19)
[2889] Should Python classes each be in their own file? - (2010-07-27)
[2953] Turning an exercise into the real thing with extreme programming - (2010-09-11)
[2977] What is a factory method and why use one? - Example in Ruby - (2010-09-30)
[3085] Object Oriented Programming for Structured Programmers - conversion training - (2010-12-14)
[3260] Ruby - a training example that puts many language elements together to demonstrate the whole - (2011-04-23)
[3454] Your PHP website - how to factor and refactor to reduce growing pains - (2011-09-24)
[3607] Designing your application - using UML techniques - (2012-02-11)
[3760] Why you should use objects even for short data manipulation programs in Ruby - (2012-06-10)
[3763] Spike solutions and refactoring - a Python example - (2012-06-13)
[3798] When you should use Object Orientation even in a short program - Python example - (2012-07-06)
[3844] Rooms ready for guests - each time, every time, thanks to good system design - (2012-08-20)
[3878] From Structured to Object Oriented Programming. - (2012-10-02)
[3887] Inheritance, Composition and Associated objects - when to use which - Python example - (2012-10-10)
[3928] Storing your intermediate data - what format should you you choose? - (2012-11-20)
[3978] Teaching OO - how to avoid lots of window switching early on - (2013-01-17)
[4098] Using object orientation for non-physical objects - (2013-05-22)
[4374] Test driven development, and class design, from first principles (using C++) - (2014-12-30)
[4430] The spirit of Java - delegating to classes - (2015-02-18)
[4449] Spike solution, refactoring into encapsulated object methods - good design practise - (2015-03-05)
[4628] Associative objects - one object within another. - (2016-01-20)
Some other Articles
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