John D. Mitchell's Blog

It's about about the language

The Furious Purpose blog entry,Mock roles, not objects mentions a paper given at the last OOPSLA on how to think about mocking in terms of roles that need to be fulfilled. Partly, the blog entry is about the benefits of TDD (Test-Driven Development). If you're not hip to TDD yet, check out Kent Beck's book Test Driven Development: By Example.

In my mind, however, there's something a bit more fundamental and interesting underlying this discussion... That is, answering the question: what's the language that is being created? In the Furious Purpose example, it's a language that is manifested as a programmatic API in Java starting with a user login story. As programmers, that fact that we are creating and manipulating languages seems about as obvious as water is to a fish but that is precisely why I think it's something worth thinking about -- we are so easily caught up in the leaves that we miss the trees, the forest, and the bulldozer that is about to run us over.

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