The Imperfect Mirror

This week young master Zjing was reviewing the code of the Elephant's Footprint Clan, whose monks were called upon to design database tables, create triggers, and build the persistence layers of the Temple’s applications.

On Monday she saw a table named CustomerAddress,
designed to hold the address of a Customer.
It had eight columns suited for this task.

Likewise she found a class named CustomerAddress,
which had eight corresponding properties.
All is as it should be, thought the master.

On Tuesday she saw a table named BusinessAddress,
designed to hold the address of a Business.
It had nine columns suited for this task.

Likewise she found a class named BusinessAddress,
which had nine corresponding properties.
Just as I expected, thought the master.

On Wednesday she saw a table named RegimentAddress,
designed to hold the address of a Regiment.
It had ten columns suited for this task.

Likewise she sought a class named RegimentAddress,
which had ten corresponding properties,
but no such class was found—

And while there was a class named Regiment,
its address was kept in a BusinessAddress,
where ‘street’ now held three unrelated fields,

and ‘postalCode’ the ‘baseNumber’,
and ‘suite’ the ‘barracksNumber’.
Welcome to my nightmare, thought the master.

On Thursday she located the developer
who had declined to implement a RegimentAddress.
She asked him to explain his rationale.

Reuse, the monk said proudly:
for is it not better to have less code to manage?
Simple novice error, thought the master.

On Friday she checked the monk’s code again,
for she had advised him on the virtues of consistency,
and was eager to see his progress.

Once more she sought a class named RegimentAddress,
which had the ten expected properties,
but no such class was found—

Indeed, now BusinessAddress was gone,
and CustomerAddress too. And in their place,
one Address class with twenty properties—

crossing all three ‘Address’ tables,
doomed forever to be partially filled.
EXPLETIVE DELETED, thought the master.

On Saturday she sat by a pond,
regarded the reflection of three maple trees,
and thought:

Three trees above, three trees below.
This mindless pond
has more good sense than that monk.