Express What, not How.

[Raffael Cavallaro]

In article <92c59a2c.0310151005.37701b8c at posting.google.com>,
 jcb at iteris.com (MetalOne) wrote:

> Raffael Cavallaro 
> 
> I don't know why but I feel like trying to summarize.

Nice summary.

> Your position now appears to have
> changed to state that lambdas are ok to use, but their use should be
> restricted.

First, let me say that I'm not delusional enough to think that a few 
Usenet posts by me are going to change the way anyone codes. I do find 
Usenet most useful for clarifying my own thinking, however. Nothing 
forces you to be precise more than having to defend, amplify, and 
clarify your ideas in the light of other peoples comments. If that means 
that my stated position appears to have changed, then fine. The whole 
point of discussion is for people come away from it with a clearer idea 
of what both they and others really mean to say. If one's ideas are 
never modified in the slightest by discussion, then one isn't really 
listening. I would say that my position is the same - I still have the 
same tastes in source code style. However, I think that this back and 
forth has made my views much more precise (I'm pretty sure that I've 
never written up 2 explicit criteria for the appropriate use of 
anonymous functions before, for example).That increased precision is a 
good thing.

> But when you're writing small functions and
> everybody else is writing 300+ line functions you begin to wonder if
> it is you that is doing something wrong.  It is nice to see that other
> people actually do think about how to write and structure good code.

You should dowload squeak (the open source Smalltalk implementation) and 
browse the code The squeak browser, like most Smalltalk code browsers, 
is quite nice. Realizing that the entire functionality of such a complex 
dynamic environment is composed of an interconnected set of thousands of 
methods, few of them more than a dozen lines in lenght, can be a kind of 
revelation if one hasn't seen a whole system written in that style.