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Flash Builder Development

“Wow, I can’t spell” or “Building Flex Builder’s refactoring infrastructure”

It’s funny how your brain works, or at least how mine works. For this release, I was tasked with creating the refactoring features in Flex Builder 3. That meant implementing find references, find declarations and some basic refactorings…not the smallest or easiest undertaking ever :)

Anyway, there’s an interface called IOccurrence that I wrote to represent an occurrence of an identifier found in source code. It’s returned back from the core refactoring engine, and I use it everywhere. One problem: everywhere I used it, and even in the interface name itself, I wrote “occurence.” Yep…occurrence has two r‘s.

In my head, here’s how the conversation with management should have gone when they assigned me refactoring many many months ago:
Management: “David, we’d like you to implement refactoring…”
Me: “Woohoo! Finally!”
Management: “Can you do it for the Moxie release?”
Me: “Not a problem.”
Management: “Alright…can you make sure to spell all your interface names correctly?”
Me: “Umm, no. I’m sorry, I just can’t do that.”

As my co-worker Mike said: “David: he’ll come through with rocket science, just don’t ask him to spell anything.”

Anyway, back to the trenches

Discussion

4 comments for ““Wow, I can’t spell” or “Building Flex Builder’s refactoring infrastructure””

  1. If only there was some sort of feature in your IDE that allowed you to fix this mistake easily…

    Posted by Matt | December 5, 2007, 4:36 pm
  2. I love it! I tell everyone that I got into programming because it doesn’t matter how you spell something as long as you are consistent.

    Posted by Ken | December 5, 2007, 10:25 pm
  3. Thank God you implemented refactoring, Now we could fix those kind of mistakes by just refactoring the name! ;o)

    Posted by Arul Prasad | December 15, 2007, 10:24 pm
  4. Nice way to fix the mistake!

    Posted by Abi | February 29, 2008, 12:34 am

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