Code Curmudgeons

My old pal Esther has a piece up that's been Slashdotted about coding practices nobody misses.

I do miss some of these, though. I miss the sorting and fiddly bits. Not all the time. But, like optimization and memory management, mentioned later on in the list, sometimes that was the difference between having a usable product or not. It was a very intellectual exercise with very practical outcomes--not a common thing these days.

Building your own GUI was fun, too. Some people still do it, of course. Squeak Smalltalk has about 40 different (mostly incomplete) GUI systems. I suspect a lot of people miss building those.

Spaghetti code I don't miss, but I'm not sure that object drill-down is much better--nor the mega-objects people use to make their class hierarchies broad instead of deep.

As for manual multi-tasking, Flash isn't multi-threaded. So, yeah, some of us still have to do that.

Finally, being patient? I find that I'm still waiting on computers after all these years. Yeah, slow compilation -- well, look, I went from BASIC to the mainframe. The mainframe compiled before you could take your finger off the enter key after submitting. When it was running, anyway. Downtime was longer.

But now? I have to wait seconds or minutes to for my computer to boot up, or transfer data, or do whatever it's doing--probably because somebody didn't feel it was necessary to do all the optimization and fiddling we don't have to do any more.

Smalltalk vs. ActionScript

ActionScript:

for each(var anObject: AClass in aCollection)
{
anObject.DoSomething
}

Smalltalk:

aCollection do [:anObject | anObject doSomething].

While not severely different, Smalltalk has the purity of the entire statement being composed of objects and messages. The dynamic typing eliminates the need for the AClass reference, which has ramifications that are too complex to cover right now. Though I think the ":anObject" is a syntactical construct, not an actual message to the block--it sure looks like it though, doesn't it?