[H-GEN] (fwd) The dumbing-down of programming

[Christopher Biggs]

Martin Pool <mbp at meesha.humbug.org.au> moved upon the face of the 'Net and spake thusly:

> Chris exhaled, and spoke:
> >

[out of order quotation follows]

> The worst part is that in the amount of time I spend with the 
> wizard I could produce concise, readable code from a decent class 
> library.

Q 69. Generated code sucks:		(*) Strongly Agree.

> >Yes, and if you've ever had to hack the source code of MicroSlack
> >Foundation Classes to get the job done, then you know that some of
> >those assumptions suck way hard.  That shit is Bad Code.
> 
> I have, and I felt the same as yourself and Ms. Ullman: I had no idea
> what this code I'd supposedly written is supposed to do, and it was
> very screwy, hard-to-read stuff.
> 

However, It's worse than you think:

In order to get relatively sane behaviour from MFCs context help, I
not only had to hack generated code, I had to rewrite the actual core
MFC framework itself!   There was one piece of code that *obviously*
should have used their own message-passing framework, but instead just
hardcoded a call to a particular routine.  Yuk!   

They even define a message type for that action, but then prevent you 
handling the message...

The only way I could see around their BHM[1] was to rewrite that routine
the Right Way.

And as for those "example" programs.  Bleah...

cjb.

[1] Bone Headed Maneuver
--
| Christopher J.  Biggs | EMAIL: chris at stallion.oz.au (PGP and MIME OK)  |
| R&D Software Engineer | PHONE: +61 7 3270-4266  FAX: +61 7 3270-4245   |
| Stallion Technologies | Microsoft is not the Answer.                   |
\ Queensland, AUSTRALIA | Microsoft is the Question.  NO is the answer!  /


----------------------- HUMBUG General List --------------------------------
echo "unsubscribe general" | mail majordomo at humbug.org.au # To Unsubscribe