Re: The curse of constant fields

Juha Laiho wrote:
I got recently bitten by something I consider to be a rather nasty
feature in the Java language, and decided to write up about it.

I had to do a couple of simple changes to a relatively shaky and
not-so-testable codebase, so I chose to do the absolute minimum
required: change initialization values for a couple of String fields
in a class, compile the changed class, and run the code manually to
observe that I had achieved the desired change.
....

You have my sympathy for your frustration, but I would call this story
"The curse of manual builds".

Back in the 1970's, long before Java was invented, I worked on a large
project that avoided reassembling all the code by having a team of
programmer techs who constructed the list of modules that needed to be
assembled due to each change. The programmer techs did their best, but
it was a *very* error prone procedure.

Since then, I have seen complaints, for several languages, of the form
"I did a manual build, and got into trouble due to [some aspect of the
programming language or environment]".

I am convinced that the only viable choices are rebuilding everything
for every change or using language-appropriate automatic dependency
analysis.

Patricia
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: The curse of constant fields
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  • Re: The curse of constant fields
    ... feature in the Java language, and decided to write up about it. ... in a class, compile the changed class, and run the code manually to ... programmer techs who constructed the list of modules that needed to be ...
    (comp.lang.java.programmer)