Elf Sternberg

I've been struggling for the past three days to make a strange problem in coding come together at the office. The problem is one of those classic object-oriented issues where two objects, both descendents of a heirarchy, both need a collection of objects from another heirarchy, but before those objects are included both heirachies need to become unique.

This problem is known as a mixin. The second body of classes is by definition incomplete. They don't work by themselves. They need data supplied by the unique classes at the top of the other hierarchy, but the data needed to be massaged to give it commonality with the mixin classes. (In one case, the data comes out of a server configuration for editing; in the second, the data is a midpoint for a new server configuration wizard).

It was such a bewildering collection of data channels that there was only one way to deal with it: go literate. I pulled out a new tool called Winefish, a LaTeX editing tool based on Bluefish, and started to document the process I was trying to make work.

Not only did I get it done, but I managed to complete the entire tool chain. This morning I had been afraid I was a day behind schedule; now, I'm a day ahead of schedule. Most excellent.