snoofle

Since the first caveman first discovered the concept of this is more valuable than that, the science of alchemy has captured the imagination of many an enterprising soul. Unfortunately, to date, nobody has had any real success in transforming worthless metal into gold. That was, until the wonder that is PHP came along...

Jon C. was planning to outsource a very simple order tracking system. He interviewed many prospects, each more hopeful than the last. He viewed samples of the websites they had built, and picked the one he liked the best. Jon then commissioned the job for his order tracking system to a local developer.

The Abstractor, as Greg and his team liked to call him, was a contractor at their company. The Abstractor had built a C# framework architecture (affectionately called Big Momma) that quickly went from being the company's framework, to being his personal baby. At the heart of Big Momma were abstract "Values" collections that wrapped the normal microsoft.net collections. This was so that any time The Abstractor decided that using arrays, XML or List<T> was bad, he could easily change "Values" to store data in some other data structure, and the code using it would be none-the-wiser. After all, enlightened developers use encapsulation, right?