subsymbolic

A Note on Documentation

Posted on January 4, 2017 by subsymbolic

Code documentation, it can be tedious to write and maintain, what’s a developer to do?

I was asked for my advice on documentation today and realised just how much my approach had changed over the years. In my eager early days of development I thought the mark of a true professional was someone who in addition to taking the time to write quality code, also took the time to document it beautifully. I documented classes and methods religiously and sprinkled my code with helpful inline comments. These days I take a very different approach.
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Java Assertions

Posted on March 28, 2012 by subsymbolic

Overview

Java assertions are wonderful things which help define the desired behaviour of an application. For example the following assertion states that the variable number should be non-negative:

 assert ( number >= 0)

Unlike exceptions, which can be caught and handled gracefully, an assertion failure indicates that something has gone terribly wrong within the application and causes it to exit. Thus, in the above example, if assertions are switched on and number is equal to -5 the application will crash. Continue reading →