Comments for On Tech and Software

Comment on Simple Pagination by Jan Michael Tan

Jan Michael Tan — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 01:21:49 +0000

@Michael Murray
Thanks for pointing that out, this is the first time i’ve tried posting code snippets.

Comment on Simple Pagination by Michael Murray

Michael Murray — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 01:08:13 +0000

I believe your server-side script (perhaps WordPress) is munging your code.

& turned into & for example. There are also some omissions in your code.

Comment on Enterprise and their sucky frameworks by Jan Michael Tan

Jan Michael Tan — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:12:47 +0000

@Caligula
Most of my experience is similar, but i’ve encountered a couple of big companies which warranted this rant because their solution was really absurd.

Comment on Enterprise and their sucky frameworks by Caligula

Caligula — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:02:03 +0000

Having consulted at several Fortune 500 companies I can unequivocally state that this simply isn’t the case: every single one of those companies is using a standard, off-the-shelf web framework, ORM, JavaScript, etc. framework simply because it’s far more cost-effective on many levels.

Comment on Enterprise and their sucky frameworks by William Louth

William Louth — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 10:53:54 +0000

The same could be said for every new non-standard open source web framework. Do we need another one? OS developers seem to have no problem making the same decisions.

Your solution (leaving side standards) looks like the problem itself.

It frustrating but unfortunately there is no known cure - developers will develop (and not necessarily what they should be doing).

Comment on 5 things that suck about weak typing by Adam Żochowski

Adam Żochowski — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:13:30 +0000

The problem with strong typing is that it never is strong enough. We have int/decimal/float/real/double, but we do not have meters vs feet.

All languages that are touted to have strong typing do not really support meters vs feet problem. Maybe C++ can do that with operator overloading, but no one does it.

And these are most common problems one deals with. Same problem with strings. Is this SQL escaped string? or [ht|x]ml escaped string? or url encoded? How about preventing concatenation of ISO8859-2 encoded string with CP1250 encoded string? Funnily enough, SQL supports collations out of the box, but most programming languages do not.

Once I see a strongly typed system then I will use it. Right now current ’strong typed’ improves very little over weak typed.

Kind regards

Comment on Oh no its PHP!!! by Alexandr Kot

Alexandr Kot — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:47:29 +0000

It’s not only Java only people opinion. Using a sledge-hammer to crack nuts - it’s a problem for .NET “adepts” too.

Comment on 5 things that suck about weak typing by Sascha Meyer

Sascha Meyer — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:12:51 +0000

What have dynamic program-languages to do with cults like Scientology? A lot. Look at the comments and look at the comments in other blogs. The “Dylang”-crowd is like a bunch of religious worshippers. And they are a very small vocal minority compared to the silent majority who uses static program-languages for good reasons!

Comment on 5 things that suck about weak typing by Stimul8d

Stimul8d — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:05:37 +0000

Jesus, give this guy a break. If you’re not REAL nitpicky about the nomanclature used in the article this guy has a reasonable, though often repeated point. If some of you people got off your high-horses and stopped being so bloody elitest maybe they’d have a chance at getting laid!

Weak (or dynamic,..or loose,..you choose!) typing can be a bitch to work with. Anyone with a real degree of experience knows this to be true.

There ARE disadvantages to using a dynamically typed language (as are there to statically typed languages) and while i don’t agree with some of the points in Jan’s post he’s mostly there.

1. Coding standards SHOULD be in place an ANY team but in reality, they’re not. Especially teams of developers with little or no formal qualifications,..which is more commonplace than you’d think.

Where a language is dynamically typed you might want to consider using a flavour of hungarian notation ,..most of your runtime errors are going to exist in the implementation, not the structural code.

2. Null point. Maintenance is a pain either way!

3/4. Tooling has come on a long way but it IS still a pretty ropey in places and without a compiler you’ve no first line of defence. On a large project with many dependencies, that can be a total arse!

5. I have seen some progress on this front too but it’s still not enough . check out Mozilla’s latest shot at JITing JScript; it’s called TraceMonkey i think.

Comment on 5 things that suck about weak typing by Jan Michael Tan

Jan Michael Tan — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:10:06 +0000

@John Rockefeller
For both team usage and maintenance issues the one thing that can solve this is having a strict guidelines on coding standards and making sure that everybody follows it. Having strict guidelines allows a developer, who isn’t part of the original team, to come in and do maintenance work without tracing too much code to find out what this variable suppose to do. I’ve several experiences whereby knowing the return types and object types allowed me to easily understand the flow and design of the software.