JohnL4

486 reputation

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	location	Durham, NC
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visits	member for	2 years, 1 month
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Middle-aged developer who remembers the thrill of developing on 24x80 dumb tubes.

[Update, 7/15/11] On the assumption that people will be coming here to find out what particular flavor of idiot I am, I have a master's degree in Computer Science from UNC-Chapel Hill and I've been either a software developer or in grad school since 1983. I've coded in Z-80 machine language, TRS-80 BASIC, COBOL, PL/1, Pascal, FORTRAN-77, LINC, ALGOL-68, C/C++, emacs LISP, Eiffel, Prolog, Perl, Java, C# and VB.NET and then the homework assignments and little utilities and experiments in a variety of other languages.

The language I would really, really like to grok these days is Haskell. Someday, I'll get past monads.

	486 reputation	bio	website		visits	member for	2 years, 1 month
29 badges		location	Durham, NC		seen	Sep 17 '12 at 18:03

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Jul 18	comment	Accessible book on functional programming Hmm, sensei, not sure I'd use that imagery, but whatever. It ain't violent nor is inner strength an issue, but I'll agree w/the rest. "Gentle" is a little humorous here. Like "modest proposal".
Jul 15	comment	Logic in setters vs. getters? @Job: Good link, thanks. msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229054.aspx
Jul 15	comment	What is the term for IntelliSense in a non-Microsoft world? @MainMa: Microsoft may have invented the word, but not the concept. I may be being a bit unfair, but I have a really strong reaction to people buying into Microsoft's lie that they're innovators, when, in fact, most of what they're doing is a copy of something else. Anyway, I didn't do any downvoting.
Jul 15	comment	Logic in setters vs. getters? 10-4, thx. I was enamored of event-driven stuff (in the Java world, PropertyChangeListeners and all that) a few years ago, but my beef is that it's really hard to statically know which handlers will get run. But... I'll bear it in mind. :)
Jul 15	comment	What is the term for IntelliSense in a non-Microsoft world? Microsoft invented it, huh? ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=2023
Jul 15	comment	Logic in setters vs. getters? The question is more about managing complexity than performance, I was just anticipating a response I never got. :) (...is why I brought caching into it.)
Jul 15	comment	Logic in setters vs. getters? Would that it were so simple. It's essentially an index into an XML tree of questions to ask the user. My eye just slid over it naturally, because it looked like a simple member variable or property set. Furthermore, it's in the middle of a simulated user click, because the programmer who came before me wanted to achieve results by pretending the user had clicked on a button rather than by refactoring code out of the click handler. And anyway, this is all in the middle of a huge (different) click handler call tree, so, by the time we're done, the GUI will definitely be updated.
Jul 15	comment	Logic in setters vs. getters? Whoops, my bad. Didn't make clear that it's a VB.NET property with setter, not a simple public data member. What, you couldn't read my mind? All my questions about setters now apply to `obj.SetTabOrdering(3);' -- do we prefer complexity in SetTabOrdering(), or we prefer it elsewhere, such as (for wild example) GetTabOrdering() or IsTabInForeground()?
Jul 15	comment	Logic in setters vs. getters? Yet another clarification: This is VB.NET code that actually calls the setter of a property. It is NOT the simple setting of a data member, even though it looks like it.
Jul 15	comment	Logic in setters vs. getters? On a separate thread, no less. I think he's assuming an app in which the state change/computation is really heavyweight and it's ok for the old state to hang around a while. Case in point: Amazon shopping cart. "Add to cart" is sort of a setter which fires off a cart update, "check cart" is the getter which the user expects to return quickly. So, (a) we precompute cart on a separate thread, for responsiveness, and (b) it's not the end of the world if the cart doesn't get updated w/in a couple of seconds, because a user checking his or her cart that fast is the exceptional case.
Jul 15	comment	Logic in setters vs. getters? Thanks, y'all. Just to clarify: I know language syntaxes. Property-vs-method is not a syntax question, but a higher-level sorta thang. Hmm, I wonder how tell-don't-ask factors into this.
Jul 15	comment	Logic in setters vs. getters? Right. I always forget something significant. But... What's your definition of "property"? Something with a backing variable? So, a data member named mBar and an accessor getBar() is a property, while a function getBlurgh() with no backing variable and a complex calculation whose result is cached (memoized) is not a property? And, if we later change the code to delete mBar and turn getBar() into a computation, it's no longer a property? How is "method" distinguished from "property"?
Jul 12	comment	lightweight, sustainable processes for good code/design quality? Ok, "the solution is conversation" is the answer. I was hoping for a silver bullet, but... no.
Jun 10	comment	Looking for unpaid interns (2) - am I crazy? Or they read what they've heard before and you get the "benefit" of the response. You're right, you didn't say useless, I just heard it.
Jun 10	comment	lightweight, sustainable processes for good code/design quality? I know all that. And I'm not the guy telling people what they're doing wrong. Nor am I the prima donna you seem to think I am, although nobody can tell what anybody's thinking, right? I'm looking for specific, non-abstract steps we can take. "Involve the team" is kind of high level. "Let the team do what it wants" seems like a recipe for inertia. The team is already doing what it wants. Does that mean I should find a new team?
Jun 10	comment	lightweight, sustainable processes for good code/design quality? Ok, who initiates (requires) the code reviews? Management? Senior developers?
Jun 10	comment	What's the canonical retort to “it's open source, submit a patch”? -1 open source asshole answer. Not useful. (Sorry.) There is no canonical "retort". Best response (assuming the OP can't just submit a patch, which I think is a reasonable assumption in this case) is one of (1) "I don't have the capabilities or resources to generate a patch [and possibly include a link to this very question]", (2) eyeroll, no response, use of tool in its current state, or (3) search for a better tool.
Apr 21	comment	What Impact Do Scripting Languages Have on Junior Programmers? That is true, but... (a) not understanding the basics leads to some bad code (via hacking-til-it's-right or sloppy programming), and (b) I was trying to motivate why pointers are still relevant, not asserting that C is better than garbage-collected languages in terms of memory leaks. The objective of getting to pointers asap is so we can then get the heck out of C.