[kevingadd]

'the publishing will only happen now' is the kind of assumption that ends up being false very rapidly. Or immediately, if you're writing automated tests. That's kind of the point.

I tend to write stuff similar to your example in C# (though I tend to make them 'public readonly' instead, because I hate accessors), and I agree that it's kind of tiresome. But that is really just a deficiency in C# - it lacks a concise way to express such patterns.

And to be fair, it's absolutely true that if you wanted you could just use global variables. You are absolutely paying an up-front cost when you do this, but you should look at that cost as an investment: In the long run it will pay off by making your code easier to understand, easier to maintain, and easier to extend, because its dependencies on global state are painfully obvious. Sometimes that investment may not be worth it, so you have to make the judgement call.

[h2s]

    > 'the publishing will only happen now' is the kind
    > of assumption that ends up being false very rapidly.

I think you're right, and part of the problem here is the time example clouding people's judgement. The fact that we as humans experience time as a continuous global phenomenon is irrelevant from a software engineering perspective. The current time is data no different from any other data.

It's not even difficult to think of an example of your point about the assumption quickly becoming false. Presumably our "publish" method exists within a blogging application. An extremely common feature in blogging software is some tool for importing posts from other blogging applications. In that situation, you need to be able to pass in the time as input.

[darrencauthon]

I write automated tests (using TDD), and it's not an assumption that would end up in my tests. Testing would not force me to introduce the date as an argument, at least not in Ruby.

That's the thing about Ruby, or perhaps another true thing that can be gathered from DHH's post: Ruby lets you make the judgment call you're talking about, without sacrificing the testing. C# would.