It was great when RoboClaw control UI project picked up help from somebody who knew what they were doing with web design. But it exposed a problem: the code is dependent on an actual RoboClaw motor controller connected to the machine. This was fine when development work focused on how to talk to the controller and hear what it has to say in return. But now that we have a parallel track working on improving the UI appearance, the RoboClaw dependency is unnecessary.

import roboclaw_stubTo remove this dependency, we introduced a RoboClaw API stub which could stand in for a physical RoboClaw when iterating through UI work. To do this in languages like C++, we would have to declare implementation of an interface and write a body. This makes sense when we expect all implementations of an interface to have roughly equivalent levels of functionality. For a test stub like this, though, that is not true. We only needed the small subset necessary to allow development of the specific relevant UI component. In languages like C++ this means most of the interface implementation would be tedious fillers that do nothing but raise a "Not Implemented" error.

Fortunately we are working in Python, which does not have such rigorous enforcement of interface implementations. We could implement just the methods we actually need to unblock UI development, and stop. There's no need to recreate everything and we could leave out all superfluous "Not Implemented" declarations.

This is one arena where "duck typing" works in our favor, letting us get away with skipping all formalities of statically typed languages. There are downsides to dynamic binding but today it is a win.