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Wyświetlanie postów z grudzień, 2014

The pitfall of teaching C++


Many years ago I read a book from Prentice-Hall about object oriented programming. I don't remember exactly when that was - either shortly before starting studies at university or at the very start of the first year there. I read about methods and messages and I analyzed diagrams on which object A was said to be passing a message to object B by the means of calling one of B's methods.

Objects then seemed to me like active, almost living entities able to communicate through this mechanism of message passing (calling each other methods). I was disillusioned to learn later that this was not true. Objects didn't have concurrent lives and the so called message passing turned out to be ordinary, synchronous function call.

(The book contained examples in C++ and Smalltalk; I ignored Smalltalk examples while reading it; I realize now that my first impression of how objects communicate through message passing was, to great extent, true for Smalltalk).

That was the first bad…

Common NonSense

I am very upset when common sense is mentioned during discussions about Scrum and generally about software development. It is usually used in sentences like: "yes, we use Scrum, but we are not erthodox about it, we just use common sense".

Why would I be so angry about it? Isn't it good that people actually use common sense to make decisions? After all, Scrum is also said to be "based on common sense".

This is the question to everyone who claims that the use of common sense is a virtue: what brought you to where you are now? Wasn't that common sense?

Wasn't that common sense that told you to separate programmers from testers?Wasn't that common sense that told you to separate analysts or architects from development team?Wasn't that common sense that helped you invent "iteration zero" in which you are excused for not delivering anything useful?Wasn't that common sense that helped you invent "hardening sprint" in which you exe…