Dream coding a Composition

April 14, 2004 on 9:21 pm | In General |

You know you have been coding too much when you start dreaming about it. Not exactly about someone (yourself or anyone else) coding, but about code itself. I remember that when I was preparing for the CPE (Certificate of Primary Education) exams, I used to have numbers and math operations flying around in my head; I would lie down in bed at night and do mental calculations till I fall asleep.

What happened to me this morning as I came out of sleep was very similar, except that I was manipulating the code I am currently working on. What still amazes me is the fact that I actually uncovered an anti-pattern in a piece of code that I had not touched for weeks. Although it may be funny that the word “Eureka!” flashed through my mind at the same time, it is wonderful that such a thing could happen. The anti-pattern in question is as follows.

I have a business class called User that is a composite of another class called ContactInfo, itself a composite of the Address class. What currently happens in my code at the time a user needs to be added is:

1. Instantiate an Address object.
2. Instantiate a ContactInfo object passing the Address object to the constructor.
3. Instantiate a User object passing the ContactInfo object to the constructor.

What my dream told me to do (which I am going to tonight) is:

1. Instantiate a User object.
2. Within its constructor, instantiate a ContactInfo object.
3. Within that object’s constructor, instantiate an Address object.

Of course, this is the correct way to proceed according to the composition rule, which says that a composite object should be responsible for the creation and lifetime of its components.

I am not very sure whether such dreams are healthy, or whether they are a precurse of dementia. But, I more than welcome such inspiration.

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