In the last few weeks I’ve been rehabilitating some of the first object-oriented code I wrote in the hopes of bringing my mailing list archive back online. Lately I’ve been refactoring some of the earliest, core code: the Message class. It manages the individual emails in the system and, because I didn’t understand how to extract functionality, had turned into something of a God Class.
Yesterday I tweeted about a really satisfying cleanup:
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I wanted ListLibrary.net to have a really nice user interface for browsing and reading mailing lists at length. The design leans towards terseness: get rid of the clutter and assume that people who’ve browsed a page or two will understand how things are sorted out.
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ListLibrary.net is officially launched.
I built a site to read mailing list archives because of the list MUD-dev. It’s a high-quality, all-signal discussion of online game developers. The authors are some of the creators of the current crop of massively multiplayer virtual worlds, and the archive collects their wisdom.
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Objects contain both state (data) and methods, and methods should be classifiable into commands that change state and queries that introspect state. The principle of Command/Query Separation (CQS) expresses a design principle I’ve intuitively used as a rule of thumb. With the conscious consideration that comes from hearing it, I knew how to improve some of my own code.
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My last day at the Post is Feb 20, and I’m headed to Chicago on the 22nd. I’ll be helping a family member recover from surgery, so my schedule (both day-to-day and how long I’ll be in town) is pretty vague, but I’ll be around at least a few weeks before returning to DC.
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