in reply to My number 1 tip for developers.
Start1 by typing as much as code as you know will work
In my opinion an even better option is to start by writing a test for what you want to happen, then write the code to make that test pass. Repeat until code done.
Test Driven Development takes a little getting used to, but works very well in my experience. Advantages include:
- You get pretty much 100% test coverage for free.
- You always know when you have got a piece of code working.
- You always know if a new piece of code breaks something.
So code a "caller" that uses that interface. In perl modules I tend to code this as a "main' program within the same file.
You can also do this sort of thing with Test::More and friends - and have the advantage of having something you can move to a test script later on. So instead of:
package main; use strict; my $doit = doit->new(); my @data = 1..10; print $doit->enumerate( \@data );
do something like:
package main; use strict; use Test::More 'no_plan'; isa_ok my $doit = doit->new(), 'doit'; my @data = 1..10; is_deeply [$doit->enumerate( \@data )], [1..10], 'enumerate works';
Then you don't have to think about whether what's being printed out is correct.
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Re: Re: My number 1 tip for developers.
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Sep 12, 2003 at 16:21 UTC |
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Meditations