EBoard 11: Testing and debugging

Warning This class is being recorded.

Approximate overview

• Administrivia
• Questions
• Lab

Administrivia

Introductory notes

• Make sure that you have your github keys working! If not, please stay after class and I’ll work with you on it.
• Congrats to football for its victory at Beloit!
• Today’s lab is somewhat rewritten. Fingers crossed that everything works okay.
  • Make sure that you are using the repo named something like lab-unit-testing-vscode.

Upcoming Token activities

Academic

• CS Table, Tuesday 19 Sept 2023, Noon, Day PDR, Feeding your data to plagiarism detectors.
• CS Extras, Thursday 21 Sept 2023, 4:15 pm, Science 3821. Study Abroad in CS

Cultural

Peer

Wellness

Misc

Upcoming work

• Wednesday: More readings, today’s lab
• Thursday: MP3
  • Bonus token to the first person who spends four hours on MP3 and TeamsChats me to tell me how far they got.

Questions

You can ask questions about anything related to the class! Self gov says that you should ask those questions.

Java

Administrative stuff

When are we doing command-line Java?

We’ve done a little. I’m working on the best time to fit it back in to the schedule.

MP2

Damn, Sam. That was a long assignment. Will you continue to give us such long assignments?

We should talk about what took so much time. I’ll read over the post-assessments and think through it.

Sam, you suck at updating deadlines on gradescope. Please fix the one for the post-assessment of MP2.

Done. TeamsChat me when you notice screwed up deadlines.

MP3

Subtype polymorphism

Parametric polymorphism and Java generics

Can we talk for a bit about how generics work?

We often want classes that work with “any” type of value, but we still want to instantiate the objects to work with particular types of values.

For example, we may want lists of things.

If I have a list of students, I want the Java type system to prevent me from doing stupid things with it, like putting President Harris on my class list.

Generics are intended to solve that problem.

When we create the class, we put type parameters in angle brackets.

    public class MyList<T> {
    } // class MyList<T>

When we create an object in that class, we specify the type.

    public MyList<Student> csc207 = new MyList<Student>();

Generics allow us to avoid copying code.

Generics are also called “Parameterized Polymorphism”, because the types take “many forms” which are determined by their parameters.

It feels a bit complex. Will it become more natural?

Yes.

Observation: When we call the constructor, we need to provide two kinds of parameters: The “normal” parameters we would supply to any constructor AND the type parameters.

Lab

Even with our simple configurations, we are hitting issues with different folks’ VSCode working differently. I’ve found that uninstalling the Java extensions and reinstalling them sometimes helps.

What is (5 / 9)?

UI: You can run all of your tests at once or just some of them.

UI: Don’t those green checkmarks make you happy?