Much of software development is best described as "problem-solving". Much of the rest, BTW, is knowledge capture.

When we look at the time spent on problem solving we can see four potential outcomes.

1. Time is spent producing a viable solution to the actual problem.
2. Time is spent producing a non-solution …

In it, Bruce Silver recollects process reengineering gurus who warned "Don't pave the cowpaths!". Presumably because the cow path was a random walk all over the pasture land, and wasn't the most efficient course.

However, anyone who was watched cows at work will tell you that the cow path is …

In my case, the opacity of Perl actually wasn't entirely my opinion. I was contacted by folks that were struggling with Perl. In one case, they specifically lifted up the opacity problem. "If my partner gets hit by the bus, I can't maintain these web sites."

In the other case …

Control Break Reporting is a design pattern that has been around since the earliest …

In principle, stating a problem is a trivial exercise: someone can't do something. It can be made wonderfully complex, however. The root cause of the complexity could be a fundamental unwillingness to state the problem without including technology hints like "database" or "hierarchy" or "project management" or "change control".

While some spread-sheet use is civilized numerical stuff, and other spread-sheet use is merely personal organization, too much spread-sheet use is the poor-person's database management system. I call it the Spreadsheet Schema (SSS), different from normalized relational schema and star schema.

There is a serious problems with people using spreadsheets …

"Polymorphism is nice as well, although I can't grok (yet) why this is necessarily not part of non-OO things. I'm not clear that it goes with the strong binding of state and method in a class."

Polymorphism isn't necessarily part of OO. Python actually has polymorphic functions outside of class …

testresources http://www.robertcollins.net/unittest/testresources/ purpose appears to be to manage the resources used by a test suite.

Adding this resource management context extends the Test Suite to optimize tests around the resources. This can reshuffle the TestCases to minimize SetUp's. This can be useful in contexts where …

SubUnit's http://www.robertcollins.net/unittest/subunit/ purpose appears to be to manage testing via subprocesses.

Consequently, it can run external tests not in Python, it can fork a subprocess to manage the Fixture in an isolated process.

Adding this subprocess execution context extends the Test Runner implementation of the …