Taxophobia: the fear of class-ification

My workplace is being overrun by taxophobics or classphobics - those who believe it to be expensive to create new classes, they fear refactoring and would rather stick all their methods in one, gigantic, manager class.

A taxophobic would rather have a single class with 5 similar sounding methods than 5 classes sharing a common interface with one method in it.

A taxophobic believes that there is some inherit cost in creating new files; they're self appointed byte-conservationists.

Taxophobics will try to convince you of their infantile designs based on an argument of "pragmatism". "Refactoring" is a dirty word. They love static methods and they hate unit-testing.

I've been facing an uphill battle trying to convince these people that that doing something like this :


Validator.validateX();
Validator.validateY();
Validator.validateZ();
Validator.validate....();


would be much better replaced with something more generic :


for(Validator v : validators){
v.validate();
}


But you know what ? I realised that you can't argue with these people because they have no sense of style. They've got no hope either because you can't be taught style.

My belief is that you can't have style forced on you, you've got to come to your own enlightenment, your own epiphany, though I hope I'm wrong.

Apple pricing anomaly

I'm living in London at the moment and I'm considering a trip to New York for some christmas shopping. I want to buy a SLR lens for my Nikon plus some Christmas presents for myself/wife and others.

I've got 3 Apple things on my shopping list. A 80gb iPod and iMac 24" for myself and a 15" MacBook Pro for my mother who lives in Australia.

So I did some pricing comparisons between the 3, taking into account current exchange rates, £/$US of 1.87 plus NYC sales tax of 8.375% and £/$AU of 2.49.

Below is a table, all prices are converted to £ sterling :

	US	UK	AU
80gb ipod	202	259	200
mbp 2.16 1gb	1448	1699	1606
mbp 2.0 0.5 gb	1158	1399	1284
24" iMac 2.16 1gb 250gb	158	1349	1204
pimped 24" iMac 2.33 *	1633	1899	1718

(* 2.33Ghz, 2GB RAM, 500GB HDD, 256MB graphics, Wireless keyboard / mouse )

Two things stood out above. Firstly the UK iPod is almost 30% more expensive than US or AU cost. Secondly, yes it is cheaper to buy in the US compared to Australia, but it isn't as much as I had thought ( around 10% ). (Why it would be 10% is another matter since Australia is a very close to Thailand or Shanghai where some products Apple are assembled).

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