Transcript and Dot Notation

[Sivakatirswami]

And some of us don't know anything *but* xTalk, and  I'm happy i don;'t

dot notation and such... let's be very careful...find a way to do the  
same thing in verbose xTalk and it will live...infect the language  
with obscurity and it will die a slow death from the inside out.

If everyone commented  their code well, maybe we could live with  
obscure syntax.. but...

While extending the range of functionality can be a good thing...Do  
not underestimate importance of three "viabilities:"

1. the post production comprehensibility
2. revisit the objects yourself 6 months later, does it still make sense
3. if you delegate the code base  to someone else, can they actually  
read it

These three "viabilities" can in themselves determine if the language  
will live or die.

Go Live is almost dead... did anyone read Adobe's white paper on the  
level of abstraction of GoLive's auto generated JAVA? Adobe flatly  
stated (my paraphrase) "You will never be able to understand this  
code; you will never be able to intelligently touch or tweak it, and  
we have no intention of engineering GoLive to generate intelligible  
code, if your secretaries use the WSWIG interface and produce web  
garbage, it's not our problem. If it works in Safari, but not I.E.  
and there is no way on earth to debug the page, it's not our problem.  
If you think you will ever be able to pass the corpus of web content  
created by our program to the next generation staffers, forget it."

May StackWare never walk down that path...




On Feb 27, 2006, at 7:31 AM, Karen wrote:

>
> It wasn't until I found Revolution that I managed to re-capture the  
> enthusiasm and enjoyment that I used to get when programming.  I  
> can actually write things (well, some things), rather than struggle  
> with obscure syntax.
>
> Karen