FizzBuzz Overthink as a Teaching Aid May 21, 2007
UPDATE: I’ve created a new subdomain for
the FizzBuzz Overthink project (
http://fbo.masukomi.org
), updated the links below to reference it instead and modified the Readme in
the project (and the default page of the site) to reflect the new goals of the
project.
UPDATE 2: There’s a JavaScript example in there now too which, of course, includes unit testing. More details here.
I was talking with someone the other day who mentioned, in passing, how they
wished they had some good examples of how to do unit tests for his co-workers.
There are, of course, plenty of examples of how to do unit tests but I haven’t
seen many online that show them in the context of a complete but simple
application. This conversation made me remember my
FizzBuzz
Overthink (FBO) that I’d written in Java, and it occoured to me that it
would make a great teaching application. Translating an existing FBO into a
language you’re trying to learn is also a great way to get your head around it.
The FBO demonstrates how to break down an application into useful methods, how
to write unit tests for those methods, and how to document them.
So, I’ve added a Perl version of the FBO, with docs and unit tests, although I
used
Natural
Docs for the documentation instead of standard POD because ND is just
light-years ahead of POD in my opinion. You can grab the new Java + Perl
versions
as
a zip file or better yet check it out with
darcs from
http://fbo.masukomi.org/code/FizzBuzzOverthink/
so that you can improve upon it and / or add your own language to it to help
make it a more useful teaching aid. Just use
darcs send to send me a patch with
your changes ( masukomi at masukomi dot org ). I think there are a lot of people
who would benefit from a PHP version and I’d personally love to see Haskell and
Erlang versions.
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