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How many of you are Extreme Programmers?

John Roth johnroth at ameritech.net
Wed Apr 16 14:07:13 EDT 2003 
"Christopher Blunck" <blunck at gst.com> wrote in message
news:1147e466.0304160630.5b510724 at posting.google.com...
> Was just reading a thread about how python implements protected and
> private methods.  I found JP's response quite interesting (this is
> something I've heard numerous friends of mine say of the language):
>
> [In Python] everything is permissible, but not
> everything is opportune.  And that is very much Python's philosophy:
> rather than focusing on trying to make some things impossible (and
> generally failing -- a simple cast in most implementations of C++ lets
> you blast away any "protected" that a silly library designer may have
> tried to impose on you;-), Python empowers and trusts the programmer.
>
>
> The natural response a non-Python programmer has to this statement is,
> "what?!  you __trust__ the programmer?!  that doesn't work in most
> environments."  Despite the ignorance this response demonstrates, I
> none-the-less thought about the statement and the answer I came up
> with was "we write lots of really thorough tests to demonstrate
> functionality."
>
> That got me to thinking:  continuous testing is a cornerstone of the
> XP methodology.  <generalization>And Python programmers typically
> write lots of tests</generalization> (at least more than their Java
> counterparts from what I've seen).  That being said, can that
> generalization be extended to "Python programmers subscribe to the XP
> methodology"?

Well, there's one other reason. Python delivers a unit testing tool
as part of the standard library. Java doesn't. I suspect that this
subliminal hint has its effects.

> So how many of you guys use XP processes?

I do. Writing tests before code is something that I've thought would
be a good idea for literally decades, but it took both XP and having
the test tool delivered with the language to get me to start.

John Roth
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