Some things keep coming back, such as facial hair, indigestion, and platform shoes. And for me, Java. I’m once again back in the Java world for a current engagement, and accordingly I’m again working with Eclipse.
The instant I began pairing with folks on Eclipse, my “Felix sense” kicked in, and I became unbearably indignant about the horrible defaults that too many developers simply accept. No one could tolerate more than one Ungar-ism at a time, so in this post I’ll focus on a real simple one:
public Holding findBy(String key) {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
return null;
}
Image courtesy Adam Engelhart; license
My immediate reaction was probably much like this.
A stub comment! Egads! Why in the world would people pollute their code with stub comments? Coders use their powerful IDE to auto-generate a new, empty method, but then have to waste time picking up and deleting these ugly, useless little stub comments. And horror of horrors, sometimes they don’t–I just saw a screencast where the programmer didn’t even flinch as he created and abandoned a stub comment!
The reason? Maybe it’s the 45-second effort Eclipse requires to turn off these wonderfully useless “auto-generated method stubs.” Or the painfully inadequate system for saving and restoring preferences like this (they’re all over the place), a consideration that crops up whenever you create a new workspace.
Well, I don’t want you to be able to say “I didn’t learn anything from Jeff’s blog.” Let’s start incrementing some Compulsive Coder Principles and Techniques.
Compulsive Code Principle #1
A laziness mentality is acceptable as long as you really do minimize as much work as possible. Creating stubs that need to be deleted isn’t maximally lazy.
Compulsive Coder Technique #1
Open the Eclipse Preferences dialog. Select Java->Code
Style->Code Templates. (You can find it quickly by typing code
templates and pressing Enter). In the right-hand side of the
dialog, select Code->Method body. Click the Edit… button.
Change the template’s pattern from:
// ${todo} Auto-generated method stub
${body_statement}
to:
${body_statement}
Click the OK button.
An alternative choice: Change the template to:
throw new UnsupportedOperationException("not yet implemented");
It’s an uglier version of a stub! … but, it’s so ugly it forces you to get rid of it. Where it can be helpful is in keeping you to the red-green-refactor cycle of TDD–the thrown exception will most certainly result in a failing test.
Whichever route you choose, similarly change the Code Template for Constructor body and Catch block body.
I bet you won’t ever miss the auto-generated method stubs!
Stay tuned for more Ungarisms.
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