I'm in the middle (quite literally) of working on a Scala research project involving complexity analysis that ostensibly has little to do with Umbo. The effort has been on- and off-again, thinking about it, not thinking about it and not actually writing code for a few weeks. I had other priorities.
I returned to the project today, after realizing during this little hiatus that there was an opportunity to gather more data and generate more interesting results which required writing more code.
So I wrote this extra code today that extracts the method names from the source. Then, I realized that I had tackled the last major hurdle. The only thing was that each obstacle along the path was solved by a separate program, one to strip the comments and count the lines, another to extract the method names, and finally another to parse the byte code instruction count report produced by a third-party utility.
I only needed to integrate these pieces which is a lot easier.
This approach is not new. The Roman empire was built piecemeal, a conquest at a time. We didn't get to the moon with one rocket or even a single launch. I'm just remarking on how the Scala project seemed to come together as such--or at least, there's definitely light at the end of the tunnel now.
What would have been the outcome if I had instead rushed it or been under more pressure to get it done? Suppose that serendipitous hiatus was not there. The effort would probably have lead to a very different solution.
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