Dojo IX

Last night was the latest Coding Dojo. It was an astonishing success. Not only did we all manage to enjoy ourselves, we actually produced some working code! We were attempting Kata Four (data munging), which is split into three parts. Admittedly, we only finished the first part, but it still felt like a real achievement.

The task itself was interesting. It’s the kind of task that you’d whip up in a few lines of Perl or Ruby in a few minutes. Yet with Java, it all gets much more complicated. For starters, you get exposed to the morass of Java I/O classes, which confound and bemuse me every single time.

Then there’s the text processing aspect. This actually turned out to be easier in Java, because we were dealing with a fixed width format and the natural instinct is to reach for substring().

What was nice was that with half an hour to go, we decided that we wouldn’t try to start the second part of the Kata. Instead, we focussed on cleaning up the code we had written—a pleqsant experience.

I hope we pick this one up next time. It’ll be interesting to carry on with the rest of the task.