Yes, I expect you to use the right tools.

by Charles Miller on December 2, 2002

(Update) Ack! I somehow lost the attribution when I posted this. The quotes are from Russell Beattie:

I need to say that first, both Cedric and Charles made comments like "the IDE will save us" in their posts and IMHO they're both wacky on this point. Languages and any notations you decide to use need to be able to stand on their own. If you're doing something that needs an IDE to figure out, then you're in trouble. Whatever convention you use has to be inately understandable by any programmer walking into your code even using VI.

You don't design things with big wing-nuts just because some mechanic somewhere might have a religious hatred of screwdrivers. Whatever James Gosling might say about IDEs, I have little sympathy for people who think that a text-editor alone qualifies as a complete programming environment.

Things like code-completion, fast class-navigation and Javadoc access, context-aware searches (find implementors, find callers) and inline error detection not luxuries any more. They are essential to efficient programming. And if someone is deliberately choosing to program in an environment that doesn't have them, that someone is either so good they don't need additional notation, or (more likely) wasting time and money.

Interfaces are handy, dandy and cool, but they're there to help structure your classes and allow interoperation without multiple inheritance, NOT to be the prime way of programming. If you're thinking "I'll just program to interfaces and forget about those classes", you need to come up to speed because I think that fad went out a couple years ago.

I don't really follow that either. There are very clear benefits in Java to modelling subsystem and component facades as interfaces, including the ability to transparently separate components using dynamic proxies, or to test them in isolation using mock objects.

Previously: I is NOT for Interface

Next: December 3rd