Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

I thought I had seen every which way of building a project but yesterday, I saw a first. While most people use Ant, or Make or a shell script or an IDE's built in suport, I had never seen anyone use the copy and paste technique. This person had a text file of all the commands needed to compile his application, one per class. For example:

javac com/foo/bar/One.java
javac com/foo/bar/Two.java
javac com/foo/bar/Three.java
And so on...

You get the picture. To compile a class here is the process:

1. Open a command prompt.



2. Find the command in the text file that changes directories to the proper one and copy it.



3. Paste said command into the command prompt and execute it.



4. Next find the classpath statement in the text file and copy it.



5. Paste that comamnd into the command prompt and execute it.



6. Next find the javac command for the file that you are editing and copy it.



7. Paste that in the command prompt and execute it.

Now imagine repeating those last few steps over several files and several mistakes of picking out the wrong commands out of that text file. I was shocked and amazed. Oh by the way, this wasn't the only way the developer was enamored with copy and paste. It didn't matter how short the string of text was, if it was in the source file somewhere else, he would copy and paste it instead of type it. Same goes with Javadoc. If he found a method in Javadoc, there would be lots of flipping back and forth to copy and paste the class and method names. Suffice it to say, it was a very illuminating afternoon.