[ILUG] Student hurls eggs at Microsoft CEO Ballmer

[paul at clubi.ie]

On Mon, 26 May 2008, Josh Glover wrote:

> [1] http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html

Ouch..

I assumed, at the beginning, that this was going to explain how 
Hungarian notation made code look wrong. Instead he defends it,
despite having an inkling of what the /real/ way forward is:

  "[Apps Hungarian was very valuable] ... where the compiler didn’t
   provide a very useful type system."

He fails to develop that thought into reasoning that the best way 
forward is to properly use typing. In his unsafe string example, what 
he really wants is a "unsafe string" type*, that can not be directly 
passed to his Write() method, but instead can only be written via a 
write_unsafe method (that co-erces the "unsafe string" to whatever 
Write() wants).

With hungarian, it depends on the programmer to see "wrong code". 
With effective typing, the compiler can automatically detect such bad 
code.

My bets would be on the latter to catch a lot more bad code than the 
former..

Interesting.

* Of course a lot of languages, particularly those used for web-apps,
   lack effective typing...

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
But since I knew now that I could hope for nothing of greater value than
frivolous pleasures, what point was there in denying myself of them?
 		-- M. Proust