Background: I'm looking at parsing certain X12N messages. There's a Perl program on CPAN to do X12 parsing ; the program itself isn't useful, but the X12 messages are defined via INI files. There's also a Python X12 parser with the X12 messages defined via XML files. I don't really like …

I hate to complain, but there's a Python syntax rule that has slightly cramped my style. The problem stems from a need to describe a really complex and extensible structure.

We need to describe X12N messages, which have a rather complex structure, and the structure can be customized. While the …

See Sean McGrath's Spot the warning signs in configuration file design for thoughts on the ever-gnarly problem of how to provide a workable set of configuration parameters to a program.

A programming language has all the advantages as a language for encoding parameters. I see why it's rare -- too many …

See Scott Ambler's article in Dr. Dobb's Journal , "Scaling Test-Driven Development ".

Recently, I'd seen some notes in SD Times on a similar theme, and blogged that in Not Quite Following the Book .

Ambler's point seems to be the same as Coplien's: "High-level architecture sketches created during your Iteration 0 envisioning …

See Spolsky's Talks at Yale, Part 1 of 3 for a fairly typical summary of formal methods in software development. Here's the part RL liked: "Now, if the spec does define everything about how the program is going to behave, then, lo and behold, it contains all the information necessary …

TP sent me this great link on MVC and related patterns. It's Ctrl-Shift-B's posting, Interactive Application Architecture Patterns . It is helpful at disentangling the distinctions between various kinds of model-view-controller, and model-view-presenter alternatives.

This is important because the terminology gets borrowed and adulterated sometimes. When we look at Struts , we …

See Present Perfect for some thoughts on unit testing. See some other commentary on the discipline required to write Python programs in Gnome devs too lazy for python . I think I see the disconnect that makes testing appear to be too costly; I think that some basic "meta-quality attributes" are …

Here's part of a recent email, subject "Antique Programmer in search of face lift and/or brain transplant as appropriate...". It was from a VP/Director kind of person who'd been away from hands-on technology for a few years.

"I’ve got a new Vista PC with dual drives so …

Since I spend a lot of time on skill upgrades for my clients, my books are oriented around that theme. It's something that I learned from Jim Bullock : there's a Clue Absorption Rate, and you can't exceed that rate. These books are about building skills incrementally.

I've got three Python-related …

One issue in creating a database design is working around the limitations inherent in the SQL data model. I'm going to call it the SQL model because you can make the case that the entity-relationship (ER) model is an abstraction and could have a far more expressive implementation. I'm going …