Comments on: Object Calisthenics: First thoughts

By: Follow-up to our Dev Brunch November 2009 « Schneide Blog

Follow-up to our Dev Brunch November 2009 « Schneide Blog — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 15:03:32 +0000

[...] might have heard about Object Calisthenics before, on this blog or other resources on the net. Perhaps you've read the original article, which is highly advised. In short, [...]

By: Coding Dojo #20: Groovy Sales Tax Problem at Mark Needham

Coding Dojo #20: Groovy Sales Tax Problem at Mark Needham — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 23:08:14 +0000

[...] we weren't intentionally following the ideas laid out in object calisthenics we actually ended up with code which fairly closely followed those ideas. We had very small [...]

By: Coding Dojo #18: Groovy Bowling Game at Mark Needham

Coding Dojo #18: Groovy Bowling Game at Mark Needham — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:16:24 +0000

[...] week's dojo involved coding a familiar problem – the bowling game – in a different language, [...]

By: C#: Wrapping collections vs Extension methods at Mark Needham

C#: Wrapping collections vs Extension methods at Mark Needham — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 10:27:43 +0000

[...] reading Object Calisthenics and working with Nick I have got used to wrapping collections and defining methods on the wrapped [...]

By: 2008: My Technical Review at Mark Needham

2008: My Technical Review at Mark Needham — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 23:30:41 +0000

[...] the year where I realised how much more could be done by sticking to the principles. We tried out object calisthenics in some coding dojos and I learnt a bit about the idea of managing the flow of an application [...]

By: Coding Dojo #2: Bowling Game & Object Calisthenics Continued at Mark Needham

Coding Dojo #2: Bowling Game & Object Calisthenics Continued at Mark Needham — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:41:03 +0000

[...] Coding Dojo on Wednesday night as part of ThoughtWorks Geek Night where we continued working on the Bowling Game problem from last week, keeping the Object Calisthenics approach broadly in mind but not sticking to it as [...]

By: Ivan Sanchez

Ivan Sanchez — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 21:20:32 +0000

Great post!
I've tried the same Object Calisthenics variaton in a dojo before and it was really interesting. In our case the problem was minesweeper and we also didn't finish the solution. On the other hand was really good to try an approach which would be really hard to introduce in production code.
Our conclusion at the time was that the idea is better as a guideline instead of rule. I'd like to try it again now to see if people still agree with that.

Good to read your experience in the same approach. Contratulations for the dojo!

By: Kris Kemper

Kris Kemper — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:04:31 +0000

It sounds like the experiment would have been better if the pairs attempted to solve the problem using whatever techniques felt most natural to quickly solve it, and then attempt to refactor to the rules set forth in Object Calisthenics.

I think that this parallels the idea of getting to green as fast as possible when doing TDD. An extension of that is to get to business value as quickly as possible – get the feature or features done, and then reward yourself with some refactoring.

While I don't advocate that absolutely (we shouldn't throw out our principles while coding), I've seen developers that spend large amounts of time tweaking and beautifying their code without having completed anything of real value. I've also made this mistake in the past. A beautiful piece of software that doesn't do anything is worth less than a complete piece of software that suffers from some poor implementation details.

By: Jeff Santini

Jeff Santini — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 10:31:45 +0000

This is a small point, and you probably are already aware, but the write up did not mention it.

implementing equals and hashcode on a mutable object can create problems.

Any object which you want to compare for equality, might need to be immutable. Otherwise what does the equality mean.

Eric Evans talks about mutable versus immutable in terms of entity versus value objects. as do plenty of other sources.