Contemporary Design Art part 2
Another example is method ordering. There is currently a need for TNG to (internally) choose a different invocation order for the total set of test methods, but the design as it stands currently makes this change very difficult and tricky. Thus, another bad design!
On the other hand, there are plenty of other well designed areas which have been reused in some fairly unexpected ways, all of which points to decent design.
TDD for example has an interesting approach to design. It assumes, up front, that you can’t design your way out of a wet paper bag. You write tests that ensure the system does exactly what it’s supposed to do, nothing more and nothing less. You want to change things? You do it the brute force way by stomping all over your codebase and endlessly refactoring, it’s a lot more work but, in theory, any thoughtwanker can do it. Of course the downfall of THAT approach is that some portions of TDD STILL end up requiring someone intelligent, so you’re back to square one of needing someone smart, instead of swappable sweatshop bodyparts.
Yet at the end of the day, a depressing majority of java codebases look like a 3 year old had sat down in front of a large bucket of design patterns and plucked a fistful and hurled them in the general direction of some code. Proving that the tooling approach can, at best, only help the mediocre claw their way up to the average.
