Imagine yourself in a time and place without any sort of societal structure. It’s the wilds, every man for himself, a state of nature, chaos. Now imagine that you and a couple of buddies decide that you’ll fare better in this bellum omnium contra omnes if you band together and work as a team. Through your adventures you gather more and more people that agree if with your way of thinking and doing things. The years go on and eventually you have enough members in your group to create a country. Where the country is simply the land you’ve decided to settle and the shared values that keeps people there. (See what you’ve done? You’ve created something by imposing constraints on what was otherwise chaos.)

One day a citizen of your country does something that’s not at all ok with all the other citizens. What happens? Well this person is refusing to operate based on the constraints of the country, so in lieu of a jail system (your country is still rudimentary) you either exile them or eliminate them because they are dangerous to your system. fast-forward several centuries. Your country is now a mighty empire with many states. Each of these states are different from the others so they have their own laws and societal norms that keep their mini-systems distinct and operational. Within those states there might be counties and within them cities on and on all the way down. The point I want to impress, is that each of these imposed constraints directly effects the behavior of the systems below/within it and in turn the people who choose to live in those varying strata of society.

A while ago I came across the concept of Ontological Design, or the idea that what we design, designs us back. In other words, “We become what we behold”. When we design something whether it be a chair, a university course, or a piece of software we impose a series of constraints on what would otherwise be chaos. That’s what creation is, structure from nothing. However, as a result from creating those constraints we our now forced to operate within them. Our creation is now modifying us to act within its bounds, and the more constraints we impose on it, the more and more distinct and specialized it becomes. The same is true of software and specifically Test Driven Development (TDD).

At it’s root, TDD is a feedback loop that ultimately results in the completion of some sort of software. You start with Acceptance tests which using our earlier analogy might be thought of as the laws that help form a country and set it apart from everything else. Everything follows from the acceptance tests. if something doesn’t pass them it’s exiled/eliminated no matter where it lives within the system. Acceptance tests force us to design unit tests that conform, and in turn, code that conforms to the unit tests. It’s called intentional programming. At each step the more code we write the more what we write next depends on what’s already been written. We are forced to consider the system as a whole at each step of the way, which I would argue leads to a higher quality product. However, this is only possible as a result of the built in feedback loops and this is what separates ontological design - which I’d venture to say is good and useful - and poor design.

Consider for a moment, the alternative of ontological design. Poor design, is something created without regard to its Quality (if I may borrow from ZMM). There are no tests in place to determine it’s merit (in a design sense), it’s wild and free. It’s art for lack of a better term, not craft. As such, it’s governed and judged differently. Code can be art, but it satisfies different purposes. All crafts, technologies, things created with ontological design are at their root created for a singular purpose: to modify the behaviors of the individuals that they are intended to effect in a specific way. Without this intent, it exists in a different category.

Getting back to TDD. TDD is good design, it considers this intent and creates feedback loops to consistently determine whether it is on track, it might not be the most pragmatic methodology out there to create desirable software (read TDD is dead by the creator of Ruby on Rails), but to my knowledge it is the truest.

. . .

Aside from thinking about the above. I continued to practice typing today making it all the way through the beginner courses. I intend on repeating these until my speed and accuracy get up to desirable levels. It might take a while. In addition, I got my first test to pass for clojure_ttt. I’m pretty comfortable with the testing framework Specljsince it very closely resembles RSpec,which I used for my ruby implementation of Tic Tac Toe, and I’m becoming increasingly more comfortable with Clojure itself as a language. I know one test isn’t much but I’m feeling confident and have a good idea of what to do next.

Till tomorrow!