[hinkley]

I practice something I sometimes call negative space, which sometimes ends up about as vague as it sounds.

My gold standard for well written tests is if the engineer who broke the test can fix their regression without looking at the test implementation, you have achieved nirvana.

My gold standard for well factored code is if people add a feature exactly where you would have added it. But that can be arrived at through socialization or by leaving spots where a feature would need to go if you actually need it.

You don’t need to build in conditionals for speculative features. You can just think about how you would start. What’s the first refactor? Can I arrange the code so that’s not a pain in the ass?

Bertrand Meyer felt that actions and decisions should not be mixed. For one they make testing a pain. They also increase the lines of code in impure functions, which reduces scalability of your system. A common effect of new features is adding more complexity to the decision process, so it’s easier to add 3 lines to an 8 line function than 3 lines to a 40 line function.