dave astels

I’m pleased to say that we are opensourcing our C++ xUnit-style framework. See the official announcement.

A friend of mine, Misko Hevery, has written a very cool opensource tool for analyzing Java projects and scoring them in terms of how testable they are. His plans are to have it point out what’s wrong, and make suggestions as to what you can do to improve the situation.

Check it out: Testability Explorer

Well worth looking at.

Several people have asked me for the source from my last book “TDD: A Practical Guide”. A lot has happened since that book, and the files from it that were once posted on the Saorsa & Adaption sites were lost. Unfortunately I’ve had to tell people that the source was now longer in existence.

Well, today I was doing some routine housekeeping and… Huzah!!! I found a zip of those very source files. For anyone who has been looking for them… I’m pleased to say that I’m making them available at long last. You can download it here

With my move to Google, I’ll be in a mixed Linux/OSX environment… so it makes sense to me to revisit emacs for my day-to-day programming. 

With some help from zenspider and technomancy, I have the latest carbonized emacs up & running with a nice ruby/rails environment (rinari)… and of course… the zenburn color scheme.

I just added a confirmation dialog to a cancel button on an app that I’m working on. I tested it and stopped for a second as I read the dialog.. then broke out laughing.

What do I press if I really do want to cancel?

Tonight I was exploring the current state of RubyCocoa (and it looks good), and I noticed a quote from Knuth’s “The Art of Computer Programming”, his 1974 ACM Turing Award Lecture.

Paul Graham has the text of the full lecture here.

This is a great talk, and should be required reading for anyone calling themselves a programmer. I found the last section, especially interesting.. here’s what I consider to be the core bit form it:

“Therefore I want to address my closing remarks to the system programmers and the machine designers who produce the systems that the rest of us must work with. Please, give us tools that are a pleasure to use, especially for our routine assignments, instead of providing something we have to fight with. Please, give us tools that encourage us to write better programs, by enhancing our pleasure when we do so.”

It struck me that Ruby and recent systems from Apple fill Knuth’s request quite nicely. According to Wikipedia, Knuth uses Macs.. I wonder how he thinks they answer his challenge from ‘74. I wonder what his view of Ruby is… Anyone heard anything about that?