What I love the most about this, is that even though the author only intended (in the near-term, anyway) to use this once, they still A) took care to use some degree of engineering practice, and B) open-sourced the result.
I really love seeing an example of DTP-style typesetting using Java. It's one of those problems that seems really easy, but then you look into it a little bit and decide it's not really worth the effort (and there aren't many practical, independent examples of it in practice). This person not only took the effort – to make something more personally pleasing than TeX – but also took the time to organize their code and share it, in order to decrease the scarcity of such examples.
That is an incredible story of successful yak shaving. I have the same experience, but ultimately my attempts end in failure as I lose interest and sight of the end goal. Kudos!
The author of the piece here has something to say about that, too: write code top-down.
> There are two ways to architect a program and write code: top-down and bottom-up.¶ […] The correct way to architect and write a program is top-down. This is not a matter of taste or preference. Bottom-up design is fundamentally busted and you shouldn’t use it. Every system I’ve been involved in that used top-down succeeded and those that used bottom-up failed. [...]
> At every level there’s pressure to do bottom-up programming. Avoid it. Instead, start at the top, with `main()` or its equivalent, and write it as if you had all the parts already written. Get that to look right. Stub out or hard-code the parts until you can get it to compile and run. Then slowly move your way down, keeping everything as brutally simple as you can. Don’t write a line of code that isn’t solving a problem you have *right now*. Then you may have a chance of succeeding in writing a large, working, long-lived program.
I found "Java for Everything" really interesting, so thanks for posting it. It also seems it's been featured on HN many times[1], and the progression of comments (from 10 years ago to 4 years ago, to 1 year ago where nobody commented) feel like an archaeological strata that shows how things change and how they stay the same.
Readit News
I really love seeing an example of DTP-style typesetting using Java. It's one of those problems that seems really easy, but then you look into it a little bit and decide it's not really worth the effort (and there aren't many practical, independent examples of it in practice). This person not only took the effort – to make something more personally pleasing than TeX – but also took the time to organize their code and share it, in order to decrease the scarcity of such examples.
Kudos.
> There are two ways to architect a program and write code: top-down and bottom-up.¶ […] The correct way to architect and write a program is top-down. This is not a matter of taste or preference. Bottom-up design is fundamentally busted and you shouldn’t use it. Every system I’ve been involved in that used top-down succeeded and those that used bottom-up failed. [...]
> At every level there’s pressure to do bottom-up programming. Avoid it. Instead, start at the top, with `main()` or its equivalent, and write it as if you had all the parts already written. Get that to look right. Stub out or hard-code the parts until you can get it to compile and run. Then slowly move your way down, keeping everything as brutally simple as you can. Don’t write a line of code that isn’t solving a problem you have *right now*. Then you may have a chance of succeeding in writing a large, working, long-lived program.
<https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/programming/write-code-top-...>
See also: Java for Everything <https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/java-for-everythin...>
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=java+for+everything (just searching for the URL doesn't work, because it started as http and changed to https 5 years ago)