David's Blague

Now that Surely the Robot has lived her 90 seconds of fame (I swear I will post it here when she's on HGTV), I've turned back to software. At the moment, I'm flying solo. Primarily due to the fact that nobody has hired me to fly point.

I've been playing with Perl 6 a lot. You want it, it's cool.

And I've been playing with Jifty.

The two projects have got me thinking about how software development should be handled, particularly on a big project. The tool that I'm writing at the moment is called Testy. Testy is an irritable unit testing framework.

Heh, I said unit.

My first version of Testy was written in Jifty, and it took about half a day. My result was not particularly usable, but it was quick. Testy allowed me to create testing plans, add unit tests to those plans, and, finally, to tag them.

I know we're going to look back on tagging in another ten years and say, "huh?"

Anyhow, I did all this without much of a plan, and it was a great experience. I had an idea, I executed it, and I was able to quickly move to thinking about all the problems with my idea. Before I'd even shown it to anyone.

How does this relate to Perl 6?

Pugs serves much the same purpose for Perl 6. It's not being built from a spec- it's being spec'd from a build. I imagine that Pugs will eventually cease to exist, but its purpose in the development cycle is nonetheless critical.

So, while I'm not a huge fan of "full stack" web development frameworks, they do serve the purpose of going from nothing to a finished application very quickly. And if the finished application isn't fast enough or pretty enough, I imagine it will be easy enough to clone it without all the overhead of the framework.

We'll see.