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 …

I can't find all of the Better Software Magazine articles on the Sticky Minds web site, so I can't provide a permalink. But look for "A Story About User Stories and Test Driven Development". It's good stuff, weighing out the good and bad features of "by-the-book" TDD.

Dr. Dobb's Journal …

In Lenses That Distort Our Software , I noted that the relational model of data can distort our view of the underlying reality that software models. In that posting I was whining about how meaningful structure is sacrificed to force fit information into the rows and columns of the relational world …

I see organizations stymied by a few individuals that seem to subvert initiatives and prevent progress. Or they somehow evade being useful and spend all their time in hand-wringing and "yeah-but"-ing. I'm not sure how to exploit what they can do, while getting past the stalls and evasions.

Here's …

When approaching reverse-engineering, we have to partition the big puddle of code into some useful pieces that we can manage intellectually, and will likely become parts of the resulting application. In some cases, this is either impossible or valueless. It may be that the application is so hopelessly bad that …