My code contains Horcruxes. I’m not proud to admit it, since to make a Horcrux you need to commit a murder. The murders seemed intuitive at the time, and were usually for expedience. But nonetheless, I am a murderer.
Let’s talk about how I got here.
I’m going to start this post with an excerpt from the book “Constructing the User Interface with Statecharts”, written by Ian Horrocks in 1999:
User interface development tools are very powerful. They can be used to construct large and complex user interfaces, with only a relatively small amount of code written by an application developer. And yet, despite the power of such tools and the relatively small amount of code that is written, user interface software often has the following characteristics:
- the code can be difficult to understand and review thoroughly:
- the code can be difficult to test in a systematic and thorough way;
- the code can contain bugs even after extensive testing and bug fixing;
- the code can be difficult to enhance without introducing unwanted side-effects;
- the quality of the code tends to deteriorate as enhancements are made to it.
Despite the obvious problems associated with user interface development, little effort has been made to improve the situation. Any practitioner who has worked on large user interface projects will be familiar with many of the above characteristics, which are symptomatic of the way in which the software is constructed.
