Recently I had been giving much thoughts into the programming languages like C++ and Java. I mentioned only these two because those are the ones I had been working in most of the time.
I felt somewhat burdened.
When the project grows beyond a certain number of classes and methods, it felt like a pain trying to even look at the source code. Even though the files were structured to be pleasant to read, there is this weird growing sense that something's not right.
I remembered Uncle Bob mentioned in his book, 'Clean Code', that the sequence of methods placed in the source file matters. It had to flow right. Perhaps that is my main problem.
I tried to keep my public methods as a block, and my private methods as another block. It did not work, since you had to jump from the public down to private when understanding code. Then I had all related private methods right below each public method. However, now, at a glance I cannot know what all the public methods of a class are (except through perhaps a smart IDE filter).
This is just wrong! Why are we still concern with ordering of methods in a source file! We should be working on a higher level of abstractions on them! We should be looking at only method blocks where they matter! The IDE should be smart enough to filter them out!
(I still miss VisualAge for Java from IBM).
But that's not all that made me feel burdened. I feel slow when developing on these. Perhaps its not the languages themselves. It could be my approach. I am very much a TDD guy. But recently, much affected by all the readings from 37signals on Getting Ready, etc. I wonder. Perhaps I am over TDD? Or are they even necessary?
Even Kent Beck, in his recent post on his JUnit Max, confessed that he did not take a TDD approach. There are plenty of code that were not test-covered.
It seemed that, in a rush to deliver, we had to sacrifice test coverage.
But of course, they do not apply to all scenarios. The reason I am feeling these are because, well, when I am working on my own hobby projects. I felt that I am slow in crunching out and moving towards the goal.
Lastly, a part of the burden is due to the language (definitely). The syntax are really to verbose. Lack of closures, excessive need to declare private variables with accessors. Constructors which simply set values. Lack of named parameters, which result in the need of parameter objects. There are just no lack of complains.
Perhaps I should move to a lighter, more agile language. Maybe even dynamic language.
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