I recently wrote about Connascence. I continue to find it a fascinating topic, and I recently realized that I could use it to evaluate design decisions.

Where I work, we’ve been starting to use Ruby for some of our glue code as a replacement for bash scripts, and Ruby/Rake for our build infrastructure as a replacement for Make and Ant. One of the main reasons for this transition is to make it easier to test these parts of our system. For the most part this has worked well, but there are still a few places where I’m trying to figure out the best way to write the tests.

Every so often I hear or read about the term “Connascence”, especially in the Ruby community. It has always seemed like an interesting idea, but I hadn’t followed up with more research until recently.

This post is part of a periodic series about The Tools I Use.

Starting with my next post, I’m beginning a periodic series of posts about some of the tools I use. I’ll include one or two of these posts a month, interleaving them with other content.

When working on an application that needs to be translated into multiple languages, there is always the possibility of missing some of the strings that need to be translated. You can always switch into one of the other translations and look around for anything that didn’t get translated, but this has a couple of problems:

I have re-released ExtraCatalogs, an alternative MessageCatalog for Visualworks Smalltalk that supports XLIFF-format files.

I’ve recently been attending rogue.rb meetups. At the last few meetups, we’ve been playing with writing a maze solver, an exercise taken from the Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies series.

One of the more powerful features of dynamically-typed languages like Smalltalk and Ruby is that of duck typing. As long as an object responds to the right messages for a given context, it can be used within that context no matter what actual type it has.

I’ve recently been learning RSpec after spending most of my career using the xUnit family of testing frameworks, including minitest.