subservient astronaut

1. A body of code is never finished
2. The authors have in mind some “next steps”
3. The code implicitly supports these particular next steps, and similar ones
4. The code implicitly hinders wildly different next steps
5. Adoption by users implicitly supports the current state and, depending on apparent paradigm, supports the intended next steps
6. Adoption by users resulting in persistent manifestations of the current state — that is, saved documents — explicitly hinders wildly different next steps
7. Intermittent development may distract from those next steps, but they are still implied by the code (and the current state is required by extant persistent documents)
8. Development by new authors may distract from those next step, but they are still implied by the code (and the current state is required by extant persistent documents)
9. If you accelerate for six months towards the wrong star, it takes 18 months to turn your spaceship around, decelerate, and return to your starting point at a stop. Less if you don’t mind overshooting.

Seems about right.

Compelling charts and graphs omitted.

Respected cognizant advocates the J-word: Daniel Jalkut over at Red Sweater.

In this case, he’s suggesting making it Apple’s OS-level application scripting langauge.

This darned language just keeps appearing. Standard across the board for Adobe’s application scripting, and Flash (more or less), built into Java 6, built into Qt 4 and later. Interesting.

I was working on some code, and finding that it broke a bunch of unit tests. By the advanced method of “commenting out the new stuff”, I found that the line in red below appeared to be causing the problem.

If I commented out the line in red, everything worked! Put it back in, it all breaks!

for(IDocumentUrl doc : docs)
{
	@SuppressWarnings(”unused”) AltNode docUrlNode = new AltNode(DOCUMENT_URL);
//	docUrlNode.setValue(DISPLAY_NAME,doc.getTitle());
//	docUrlNode.setValue(TYPE,doc.getType().name());
//	docUrlNode.setValue(URL,doc.getUrl());
//	cardNode.addChild(docUrlNode);
}

What’s the deal?

The line in red is just allocating a harmless object. In fact… I replaced it with:

for(IDocumentUrl doc : docs)
{
	@SuppressWarnings(”unused”) Integer x = 3;
}

With the same symptoms. Comment out the line in red, and all is well.

Ah. Java does do some optimization! Removing the contents of the iterator loop allowed Java to omit the entire loop. Turns out docs was null; removing the contents of the iterator loop avoided an exception.

All fixed:

if(docs != null)
  for(IDocumentUrl doc : docs)
  {
    @SuppressWarnings("unused") AltNode docUrlNode = new AltNode(DOCUMENT_URL);
    docUrlNode.setValue(DISPLAY_NAME,doc.getTitle());
    docUrlNode.setValue(TYPE,doc.getType().name());
    docUrlNode.setValue(URL,doc.getUrl());
    cardNode.addChild(docUrlNode);
  }