{"id":171,"date":"2009-07-02T12:29:32","date_gmt":"2009-07-02T12:29:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/andypalmer.com\/?p=171"},"modified":"2009-07-02T15:32:43","modified_gmt":"2009-07-02T15:32:43","slug":"tiny-types","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andypalmer.com\/2009\/07\/tiny-types\/","title":{"rendered":"Tiny Types"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Needham&#8217;s post on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.markhneedham.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/10\/oo-micro-types\/\">micro types<\/a> sparked an idea in my head that recently came to fruition.<br \/>\nI was pondering on the <a href=\"http:\/\/bitbucket.org\/testingreflections\/narrativefixture\/\">Narrative Fixture<\/a> code, and the fact that, although most of the internals are sensibly typed objects, at the <a href=\"http:\/\/fitnesse.org\">FitNesse<\/a> layer, we do a lot of passing of strings.<br \/>\nThe idea (at least, my interpretation) with Tiny Types is that the string obviously means something, and that we can probably classify what that meaning is (we have a sensibly named variable for it, after all) , and so why not convert it to that meaningful thing as soon as possible.<br \/>\nThis has the nice effect of making some vague things (such as typing on collections) much more explicit.<\/p>\n<p>As an example, in the <a href=\"http:\/\/bitbucket.org\/testingreflections\/narrativefixture\/src\/tip\/src\/org\/jnarrate\/fit\/fixture\/expertise\/CastingDirector.java\">Casting Director<\/a> we have:<\/p>\n<pre class=\"prettyprint\">\r\nMap&lt;String, ActorPlayingThe&lt;?&gt;&gt; dressingRoom = new HashMap&lt;String, ActorPlayingThe&lt;?&gt;&gt;();\r\n<\/pre>\n<p>and, after a little bit of refactoring, we end up with:<\/p>\n<pre class=\"prettyprint\">\r\nMap&lt;CharacterName, ActorPlayingThe&lt;?&gt;&gt; dressingRoom = new HashMap&lt;CharacterName, ActorPlayingThe&lt;?&gt;&gt;();\r\n<\/pre>\n<p>Personally, I&#8217;m a fan of <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.thinkrelevance.com\/2008\/4\/23\/refactoring-from-ceremony-to-essence\">low ceremony, high essence languages<\/a>, but while working in a high ceremony environment, we can leverage that ceremony to provide us with a nice summary of our thinking, ready for the next time we return to the code.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Needham&#8217;s post on micro types sparked an idea in my head that recently came to fruition. I was pondering on the Narrative Fixture code, and the fact that, although most of the internals are sensibly typed objects, at the FitNesse layer, we do a lot of passing of strings. The idea (at least, my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26,8,25,27,28,29],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andypalmer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andypalmer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andypalmer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andypalmer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andypalmer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/andypalmer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":198,"href":"https:\/\/andypalmer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions\/198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andypalmer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andypalmer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andypalmer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}