The only thing to discuss for this week is the Grades project. I had the impression that this could be easily done in a few hours. I was MISTAKEN! This has honestly been the most irritating project so far. The good first: implementation was a breeze and designing it by avoiding getters and setters was interesting and challenging.
But the sheer tedium of the formatted output! I think most of the time spent on this project was calculating what the width of a multitude of items would be and then how many corresponding spaces would make it look nice! Look, I'm all for formatted output - but please don't ask me to write unit tests where I have to manually count out spaces and -'s to the point where I'm going bat-crazy!
And that brings me to the next grouse - unit tests are good, but this "written-in-stone" 3 unit tests per function idea is not practical. There are some functions (like the constructors and destructors in the previous project) which don't need more than 1 or 2 unit tests. I often have way more than 3 unit tests for functions which have a number of corner cases etc., but I have started writing more monolithic functions (far less cohesive than I would want them to be) simply to avoid writing 3 unit tests for simple helper functions like calculating the number of digits in an integer etc. This is obviously not desirable and I hope Prof. Downing leaves it to the students' discretion as to what to unit test and to what degree.
I did learn a lot about C++ formatting - I'd become too used to the C-style printf format specifiers. The article on getters and setters was interesting too, though labeling them as evil is probably extreme. Anyway, I leave you with a meme I never knew existed:
