Red Squirrel Reflections Dave Hoover explores the psychology of software development

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OO Power
Thursday, October 24, 2002

I had an excellent morning. I finished Extreme Programming Installed on the train. It was an excellent book, and other than Extreme Programming Explained, my favorite XP book. Although it is not related to XP, my favorite quote from the book was...

"To become truly good at programming is a life's work, an ongoing enterprise of learning and practicing."

Yet another reassurance that my utterly compulsive desire to learn as much as I can about software development can be a good thing and not a curse (as it sometimes feels).

I got to work early. After cleaning up some tests, I did some refactoring to address a code smell that I had started smelling yesterday. There were two Struts ActionForm classes that were doing something very similar, and both had behaviors and properties that the other needed. I parentified the shared behavior into an abstract class and voila! I had the pleasure of chopping most of the code out of the child classes. I was able to use an interface to provide a way to pull up a method, making it more generic. It was a beautiful thing. I got chills.

When applied correctly, OO concepts are subtly powerful, and a lot of fun.

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