First of all: Code like a girl

to which I say: bwahahahahaha  :dielaugh:

The funny part is that I tend to pay attention to the 'aesthetics' of my code, so if this new terminology becomes mainstream, I might be labeled a metro coder. :D

Joel did a nice cut and paste job selecting the best writing about software he could find and published it in dead tree form. If you google these articles, they are all found on blogs and such, so there's no need to drag your ass to amazon for a drop of wisdom. I was making my way through the list, when I had quite the unusual reaction to one of the pieces. Paul Graham writes about Great Hackers, about half way through his article he says "To drive design, a manager must be the most demanding user of a company's products." When I read this, I literally said "yes, yes, YES!!" Rarely do I see anything put clearly and perfectly accurately like that. The hammer striking the nail in the exact center. I react that way, because that's how I've always felt about design. As a user I think about problems I face as a user, as a coder I want to solve those problems. It takes both to solve them, though, it also takes input from a lot more people to solve a problem for more than one person, but this is the very core truism that underpins the whole science of design, at least to me.

Feasible for unit testing:

• simple methods whose output is easy to process (verify addNumbers(2, 2) gives 4)

Problematic scenarios:

• methods which output complex data (html, xml etc)
• methods which modify the state of the filesystem
• methods which make calls to outside binaries

annoying things in java:

• ratio of code to functionality is depressing
• five hundred billion { curlyBrackets(); } :lazy:
• compile-test cycle drives me up the wall, even with ant. compiler is slooooow, because a gazillion libraries are loaded even to compile a 500b class. then VM is initiated to run the class. :wallbang:
• insanely complicated library in terms of instantiating classes to accomplish simple things like string formatting, string splitting etc etc

annoying things in python:

• writing self.member instead of just member

why python kicks java's ass:

• far more human readable
• much faster in Real Human Time (tm)
• functional
• softly typed
• pleasant to work with (!!!)

Java may be doom and gloom much of the time, but there are moments when we see the light. One such moment is ant. Where the standard java build system sucks, ant is the light. Ant is elegant, easy and efficient. Shockingly, ant is yet another open source project, to java's commercial patronage.