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Join For FreeI recently wrote, in this blog about state management, threading and API design, the following (talking about a refactored SwingWorker with the state information in a separate argument class):
It also removes a bit of psychological weirdness: Someone who is writing a SwingWorker subclass being is required to think to themselves “Now I have to tell myself what my state is.” I suspect many developers anthropomorphize classes they are writing — they think of the class they are editing, or the program counter, in the first person, as I, myself. I don't have empirical evidence for this, but I know I do it, and I have heard many other developers who were discussing code do it - if there's someone out there who emphatically does not do anything of this sort, I'd be interested to know about your thinking style when coding - please speak up.
It's a worthwhile question: When writing a class, do you think of that class, or the program counter moving across lines of your code, as "me"?
Coding (social sciences)
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