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Software Fashion
fedor writes "Software fashions come and go, but they always claim a few victims on the way. Where there's fashion, you'll find that rather weak willed person who is the Stupid Fashion Victim (or the SFV for short).
This great article from Software Reality is all about fashion in software. Do you all remember WAP? In a couple of years some of the current 'technologies' will be gone too. The article mentions VB.NET, struts and XP as current fashion..."
By the time we started making money I was bored.
Then I started writing low cost/level e-commerce software when no one in rural England believed it was safe to transact on the Net. I made a little, but grew restless before it peaked.
And now? Is it worth the risk in revealing the next big trend before it hits? Nah :)
I am so aware of that lovely graph they show explaining how business trends develop, peak and fade. Trouble is, it's SO DULL.
Back to the begging bowl...
cLive ;-)
ps - big hint - I like TBL :)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
A programmer at school who did Pascal liked to have descriptive 40 character long variable names. His stuff was just unreadable.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
And what is "num" in "numpoints" but a wordier, less typesafe form of hungarian notation? How can you be sure that "filename" is a char*, as opposed to a C++ string object, a BSTR, or a wchar_t*? Maybe you don't code in those environments, but I do. I need to be able deduce a variable's type, period. For now, the name is the quickest, most convenient way of doing that, as far as I know.
In response to your question, HN is at it's most useful when reading the code, before you decide what to actually do with it (as I explained in the post you commented). This needs to be done when first getting aquainted with the code, and often when editing a part that isn't in your brain cache as well.
There are times when I deride myself for my lack of ability to think in an abstract manner, then along comes a post like yours and I can console myself that there are people out there who cannot understand an anaology even if it a barn full of VB.Net code standing right in front of them.
It's amazing how people keep missing my point. Of course I can look up the definitions. Modern IDE's/texteditors will even give me the type just by hovering my mouse over the name or in some similar fashion.
My point (reiterated in the two other comments in this thread) is that it's just too slow, especially when skimming through code you're not intimately familiar with. It's just faster to get a clear view of the code if the types can be deduced just by looking at the code directly in front of me, without hovering, switching to header files definitions, or grepping the source tree.
I've even suggested a way that would bring the benefit of this easy skimmability (is that a word?) without requiring hungarian notation (using colors/icons/static tooltips), but so far noone seems to know of such an editor/IDE.
I agree with grungeKid. Modern editors still can't match the productivity I have with Hungarian.
It is true that some languages lessen the potential for confusion over the type of a variable. That's all well and good. I write in C++ for a living, where there is potential for confusion. I need to know the difference between char*, wchar_t*, std::string, etc. If I have to take my hands off the keyboard so I can point the mouse at the variable name, I lost productivity. It is true that I take a productivity hit when I change types, but a quick find/replace isn't too costly once in a while. I don't change types frequently enough for that to outweigh the benefits of Hungarian.
I agree that Hungarian doesn't have the best aesthetics, but until there is a better solution, I'll keep on using it.
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