I've now worked out exactly how to enforce my Iron Fist of Physical Typing and having written a little module to test that the ideas all work have embarked on the process of writing the actual module.
Because I want this to be easily extended (as there's no way I could program in every set of physical units and measurement systems known to man) I've needed to give a lot of thought to the interfaces provided by the module and in an unusual fit of doing the Right Thing have written the documentation and much of the test suite before starting on a single line of code. So far I'm up to 1500 words of pod (which isn't half bad for two hours of keyboard bashing) and fifty tests.
Doing it this way has certainly cleared up in my mind how I want things to work, as the documentation now forms a specification I'll need to stick to (as although not released, it's a bitch to rewrite everything). This planning in the large is also the part of coding I enjoy the most, as it requires careful thought if the result is to come out right. I even (slightly) wish that I could finish the docs then stop, hand them off to someone else and get them to write the code for me. If only I had a minion...
In other news, ox.pm had an initial meeting yesterday, which was attended. Hopefully we'll make it a monthly thing and ideally have more than five of us turn up.
