Comments on: Duct tape devs

By: ross

ross — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 19:42:09 +0000

composition is the new inheritance

Thats all ;-(

By: MKP

MKP — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 11:47:27 +0000

I’m definately a duct taper then! And I think I must have worked with your interviewer (or a clone) in the past…so many levels of inheritance/abstraction that he actually produced nothing!

By: Hibbert

Hibbert — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 10:02:16 +0000

Let’s get things done. It’s horses for courses. Knowing which technology to use is an important judgement call that one must make subjectively. Does this piece of work need a .NET component making it run 30% faster or does it need to be working and shipped pretty soon. All “good” programmers will do unit tests. They should be testing their code as they go along. I did squirm a little when I read that there is no need for unit testing, in the Duct tape article. As an Excel-VBA-Database developer myself, I use the a some of the enormous time saved from creating complexity to test my work, and then test some more with the users. You can still build quality, robust applications in a duct tape kind of way.

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 16:43:41 +0000

Mike, I’d say he was not past the ‘everything looks like the GOF pattern I read about last night cos I don’t have anything better to do’. Classic .net dev – no idea there is a world outside C# and OO. You’re right, it wouldn’t have worked for me there, lucky too as I have heard other stuff since. so a close shave all in all.

By: Joe Serdakowski

Joe Serdakowski — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 11:54:07 +0000

I try to keep things as simple and uniform as possible. I am using Excel-VBA for the front end and SQL Server, MySQL or Access for the back end, but do nothing in the database except store data and index. To be perfectly honest, I know very little about using any of these databases except how to set up tables and indexes. I started life with VisiCalc, then moved on to Excel for the Mac, then Visual FoxPro, now Excel-VBA-Database. I seem to get from point A to point B faster than sparklier programmers with less bugs, but I lose business because I am not using the politically correct programming solutions.

By: mikewoodhouse

mikewoodhouse — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 08:10:00 +0000

Nothing wrong with inheritance – I use it every time there’s no other way to get the job done. Interface inheritance is better than the other sort (“implementation”? I always forget). I’m using a genuine base class right now – keep looking for ways that it might work better/be simpler without it but not found one yet. It rather seems that your interviewer hasn’t got past the everything-looks-like-a-nail stage yet. Many never do. You probably wouldn’t have been happy there.

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 08:03:33 +0000

??
VBA doesnt do inheritance usefully, .net does, but that doesnt mean you have to always use it to the max. interview or not. I’ll leave OO and Excel for another post.

Jon, its not so much the tools that define the sparkle, more your way of using them: to either solve biz problems, or just to play with new stuff.

By: Stephen Allen

Stephen Allen — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 06:41:13 +0000

Simon, you say

“Then he asked me about design patterns, so I answered (honestly) that I tend to write fairly simple code, try to avoid inheritance and complex class hierarchies. More shock.”

but only a few weeks ago you were deprecating Excel “Class Modules” to me because they did NOT exhibit inheritance functionality.

I suspect that one’s opinions about these sorts of issues depend your perspective, when there is (or you believe there is) a specific hierarchy to the discussion (e.g. interviewer/interviewee).

By: jon

jon — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 04:15:12 +0000

I think I’ll change my answer on that after reading the article you linked to. I would say I’m in between, I like new stuff, but I also like to get it done.

If we call .NET sparkles compared to VBA, by all means give me .NET, it is so much easier to use and faster to code. But there is a learning curve that will cost you, but after that, you can put out just about anything.

By: jon

jon — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 02:49:55 +0000

I like linq. It makes it really easy to code once you learn it. I haven’t extensively used databases yet. I interact with Excel the most and using linq makes it really easy to manipulate 1D arrays.

So, mark me up as a “sparkler.”