[sf-lug] installfest Sat. @ Rick Moen's in Menlo Park/ Xandros response

[jim stockford]

    (can't resist): one last comment about readability:

    Working with Java, the top-level class made calls
from the parent, parent.parent, and parent.parent.parent
and readability depends on meaningfully named
identifiers, but sometimes even that isn't enough, in
which case one has to scramble through the code for
the parent classes, then back up to the top-level class
code, then down again for some other call..., which is
in itself spaghetti-like, seems to me.



On Jul 11, 2006, at 8:05 AM, jim stockford wrote:

>
> Willy Lee signed off one of his messages with
>
> "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder,
> but when you do, it blows away your whole leg." -Bjarne Stroustrup
>
> My remark was a wisecrack I'd invented after experiencing
> first the hype about the great benefits of OOP then the
> disappointments of reality, given I got sucked into the hype:
>     One company advertised its wares as C++ which I thought
> was really C==, as they used Visual C++ compiler and wrote
> regular old grunt and groan C, big case statements that
> could have been replace by a class hierarchy. I derived that
> committing to a class hierarchy design was scary for them
> (and that seems a prudent stance).
>     The promise that once debugged, underlying class code
> need not be re-debugged as one develops classes turned
> out to be sometimes mistaken.
>     For MSFT Visual C++ at least, the virtual table mechanism
> allows occasional corruption of resources.
>     Multiple inheritance is scary on the face of it, at least to me.
>     Pointedly, the remark is about the risks of the underlying
> classes' behavior, not code readability or the skill of any
> particular programmer.
>     It was just a wisecrack with maybe a little truth to it. I'll
> confess that I believe it.
>
>
> On Jul 10, 2006, at 10:08 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
>
>> Quoting jim stockford (jim at well.com):
>>
>>>     Best I can tell, OOP (e.g. C++) adds a whole
>>> new dimension to the term "spaghetti code".
>>
>> I'm not sure why you'd say that.  Elegant and readable code is very
>> common in, e.g., Python and Ruby.  Sometimes even C++.  (I say that as
>> a
>> somewhat irredeemable procedural programming dinosaur, myself.)
>>
>>
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