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?Extreme Programming in Python?

Harry George hgg9140 at seanet.com
Thu Jun 15 18:55:09 EDT 2000 
1 room, 2 SGI's, 3 people looking over each other's shoulders.  3 days
to spec, code, unit test, and alpha system test.  Followed by
design/code review (2 more people).  Followed by small recodes per
review recommendations (mainly refactoring, eliminating c. 10% of
LOC).  

Subject:

Obtain preliminary design of hydraulics system from a lisp app,
delivered in XML (using that app's own dtd).  Convert to neutral
representation with its own XML dtd.  Use neutral rep to drive:

a) Convert to prolog-based schematics package (i.e., generate
predicates), and in turn convert prolog to XML in the DTD of an
analysis package.  (python stoped where prolog started, but we'll
probably eliminate the prolog phase and stay in python in near
future).

b) Convert to XML (another app-specific DTD), for a
fortran-based load analysis and tube sizing app.


Impressions:

a) Domain experts can read python and participate in parts of the code
review (the engineering rules, not the comp sci stuff)

b) Programmers whose expertise is in other languages can ramp up
quickly enough to play within a few days, but can't do the overall
arch of the python code in that time.

c) Refactoring was much easier (and therefore more likely) than in more
verbose languages.

d) XP is hype-of-the-month for practices sometimes known as egoless or
team-centered programming.  For years I've had a motto for project
mgmt: Schedule with a stopwatch, not a calendar.  XP just gives me an
excuse to move at a more comfortable pace.

e) Spiral develpment was critical -- we got a hello, world end-to-end
flow going and then added features.  

f) Hard part was of course working out the semantic conversions --
each app represented a different community with its own conceptual
view of the world.




Jerome Chan <eviltofu at rocketmail.com> writes:

> Has anyone done any extreme programming in python? Care to share your 
> experiences?
> 
> <http://www.extremeprogramming.org/index.html>

-- 
Harry George
hgg9140 at seanet.com
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