Working in teams

[Richard Vowles]

One of the things this on going discussion has really bought home is the strong differences of opinion that having "other options" than just pure Java, and Java after Java 5 has on our community.

I don't think a single one of you has agreed with a single other one of you. How do you work with people?

How people managed to work in teams astounds me - we recently had a flare up over the 2 vs 4 spaces (which we solved by using tabs, so we're all happy now). But it was interesting how (further) there we discussions on how much vertical whitespace people wanted to use. 

Surprisingly I suppose, I also prefer my types to be explicit, I also have major problems with the over use of generics, but I absolutely *hate* boilerplate and won't tolerate it if I can avoid it. 

Hibernate, oh god, can we have a Kickstarter to pay Gavin King back for the pain? If we can have one for "Organic Water", we can do that surely?

Richard

On Sat, Jul 27, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Kerry Sainsbury <ke...@fidelma.com> wrote:

I don't follow your logic. I said *overuse* of generics, and meant at the application level. Sorry that I wasn't clear.

And no, I don't use implicit toString conversions anywhere that matters because you never really know what you're going to get, and (to repeat myself) I like things that are explicit.

Ooh, er.

On 27/07/2013 12:19 PM, "Mark Derricutt" <ma...@talios.com> wrote:

So you never use new style for loops, method chaining, autoboxing, or implicit toString conversions as anywhere? That's gonna be painful to work with.

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Richard Vowles,
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[Greg Amer]

Part of the issue is the balance between clarity and boilerplate and I guess that balancing line between those two factors differs between developers. So I guess the usual answer is teams need to compromise on something that everybody can live with. The problem with some of the newer languages is they have so many vectors for changing that balance that its difficult to get agreement. Especially in informal forum discussions

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[mP]

I dont understand why people worry about such nonsense like 2 or 4 spaces, but forget to push for really important stuff like good naming of stuff, javadoc etc.

[Richard Vowles]

Good naming and javadoc is easy - spacing is by far the biggest issue facing modern computer science.

On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 8:13 PM, mP <miroslav...@gmail.com> wrote:

I dont understand why people worry about such nonsense like 2 or 4 spaces, but forget to push for really important stuff like good naming of stuff, javadoc etc.

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[Mark Derricutt]

On 29/07/2013, at 8:52 PM, Richard Vowles <ric...@bluetrainsoftware.com> wrote:

Good naming and javadoc is easy - spacing is by far the biggest issue facing modern computer science.

I'd hazard to say that good naming is hard - depending on WHAT your naming, and the context of it.

I still find Tim Ottinger's paper on variable and class naming the best set of rules I've come by:

  http://objectmentor.com/resources/articles/Naming.pdf

Amen.

[Rob Lally]

I think there's three factors that stop software development devolving into battles of minutia.

1. Hiring for similarity. In many cases, the same person or people hire all of the team. Both teams and individuals tend to hire those who think and act like them. Much of the conflict is whittled out at this stage.

2. Many developers are apathetic sheep who don't give a damn about the big stuff, let alone the small stuff. Someone dictates policy to them and they accept it.

3. Many of the details that we like to bicker about aren't really important, and deep down we know that. As long as we come to some consensus, it doesn't really matter what it is. Code Hale once told me that although he didn't like the layout that Golang's standard formatter "gofmt" used or its total lack of configurability, he was glad it existed because it was a tool designed to communicate "let's never fight about this again". Richard and his "let's use tabs" story is a prime example of compromise.

Teams that don't have their low level gripes ironed out by these stages are likely to be dysfunctional; which is hardly unknown.

Teams with disparate views onto higher level, more meaningful issues tend to fracture - with some team members leaving and restoring balance, implode - with demoralised developers producing almost nothing, or explode - churning out an awful, unmaintainable product that is hated by everyone.

Rob.

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[Mark Derricutt]

And let us not forget that we've had "the old Java" for a good 15+ years now, and for the most part - Sun came out from the get-go with a style guide, which most people still seem to adher to, with the exception of tabs vs spaces - even tho the style guide said 4 space indents, I don't think it said "spaces not tabs at 4 spaces" ;p

Mark

[Mark Derricutt]

On 28/07/2013, at 8:31 PM, Richard Vowles <ric...@bluetrainsoftware.com> wrote:

One of the things this on going discussion has really bought home is the strong differences of opinion that having "other options" than just pure Java, and Java after Java 5 has on our community.

I don't think this is purely limited to languages tho - but also frameworks and libraries used, take for example endless arguments over wether FEST is better/worse than Hamcrest - which is now a somewhat fractured argument as FEST is becoming rather arse-backward useless (leading to the amicable fork to AssertJ), and in a lot of places looks/feels exactly like the Hamcrest it tried to not be.

I don't think a single one of you has agreed with a single other one of you. How do you work with people?

Generally - by making compromises where they need to be for the betterment of the project/company/solution - in a forum such as this we have no such boundary for betterment - so damnit - MY WAY IS RIGHT :)

[mP]

I wont say hard, because i think the main goal should be to improve on the boring, plain examples we often see. As long as the name is correct and not misinformation thats at the very least better than whats often the current crap. So many things are related to this. I firmly believe for example people dont breakup multi screen methods because they cant handle thinking up reasonable method names. 

[mP]

Its sad, that people dont have any brains and actually think is this useful or am i drone. The funny thing is they are only screwing themselves or the guy next door, because when it comes time to fix this mess they are stuck with their own shite or the shite given to them by their mate next door.