Create better software using dynamic programming language
PHP, Python, Javascript are some of the dynamic programming languages that many developers use in web development technology. And these languages are contributing to small business owners creating valuable solutions for their clients. There are some shortcomings of these programming languages that surfaced as your projects get bigger and bigger. Disciplined programming, Test coverage, and Flexible design help you to fix some of these shortcomings.
PHP, Python, and Javascript are three dynamic programming languages that are ruling the web development technology. You can create a valuable solution using these languages without any license because of their free and open-source nature.
Additionally, you can easily find good developers across continents or around your locality. The languages are easy to learn and quick to produce a working prototype.
But, your development team may face some problems – as your project gets bigger - imposed by their dynamic nature. I encountered many obstacles in big projects – during my use of these languages - and the following are three main problems;
- You do not know an error – programming syntax or a different method name - unless the interpreter executes it.
- Weak design contract. These languages do not enforce type hinting and infer variable types at run time, and therefore you need to take extra precautions adding the instructions.
- No design enforcement. These languages support functional and Object-oriented programming paradigms, and therefore you can have multiple solutions for a single problem. The novice or fresher engineer may fail to see the importance of design.
You could move your development from dynamic programming language to static programming language like; Java, C#. But, you should also be ready to pay license fees and higher development cost, and higher infrastructure maintenance fees.
The static programming languages are good when you create an enterprise application, and you need specialized features – multi-threading, parallel processing, and proprietor libraries – to support your solution.
Alternatively, your development team can follow guidelines to overcome these problems. These guidelines are the core building blocks of any software development, and many experienced programmers created and followed them. And they created good software products using dynamic languages.
But, inexperienced programmers don’t treat these guidelines well. And therefore, their code and software solutions suffer a lot.
Well disciplined programming standards
Writing small software or huge software is hard. You couldn’t start working on it now and have a good solution within a couple of months. It is a long journey.
And therefore, you need to set disciplined programming standards from the start.
Each team member and programmer should follow it. The standard includes file name conventions, directory structure, the class name, function name, variable name, and other guidelines.
Why?
Each programmer may infer the context information from the source code easily if your development team followed the standard. Your development team will be writing source code rather than thinking about other non-source code issues.
I have seen source code – messed up – because of different naming conventions used by programmers. It is hard to understand the real solutions.
Once you set up the programming standard, the new programmer can join your team and start producing the result in no time.
Good test coverage
You could avoid syntactical errors if you have good test cases covering the source code.
Writing test cases are like setting up your experiment. You create fixtures and application state and then run your test case against it to find any error.
Your aim should cover different scenarios and from different perspectives so that you can run through them and find any hidden error.
This practice is good irrespective of the programming language. But, a static language compiler can trigger the syntactical error during compile-time, and you may have fewer test cases.
Flexible software design
As a software architect, my focus is to create good software design. Why?
Because it allows my team member to write good test cases for most of the source code without any difficulty, and the flexible design allowed them to create fixture and application state easily.
There is no one way to test software design, but you could verify it against code coverage. And the ease of creating new features without breaking existing features.
I have invested many hours writing software solutions, and therefore I could come up with flexible software design with ease. Each design solution has a unique problem to solve, and sometimes I found myself digging further to find the right design decision.
I always follow these guidelines and therefore I could ensure you, these work.
Your problem is unique, and therefore your solution should be unique. And you could ask the developer team to follow these guidelines to avoid any inconsistency and technical debt for the future.
You could also hire our services, and I could collaborate with you and your team to create a flexible solution.