"You would have found yourself in quite a small minority there, would you not? What's the rationale there then?"
I don't know what the answer is to the second question is, but I have been led to believe that there is more than a minority who follow that practice.
I think the thing that makes me bite when Adam posts is that he tends to make statments like:
*************************
for (i=1; l < 10; i++){
writeOutput("[#i#]<br />");
}Is *much* clearer than
<cfloop index="i" from="1" to="10">
<cfoutput>[#i#]</cfoutput><br />
</cfloop>
**************************Which may be true for him, but it's certainly not true for all and he appears to make no allowance for those other people who in this case may find it quite a bit more difficult to read (FWIW I think there's merit in both styles). The combination of arrogance and inconsideration is something that just pushes my buttons. That's not to say Adam's either of those, it's just coming across that way to me.
Spike
Gary Menzel wrote:
It is my belief that these things perpetuate. People bring their baggage with them.
And I think the conversation is starting to get a little "religious" - in the sense that in my experience it is possible to "manage" anything - but that the only time I really have the right to push my view onto a group is when they are under my control to manage.
Sean and I have had a similar conversation before. If I were working for him - I would have to bend to his line of management. If the roles were to be reversed he'd have to bend to mine. Neither of us is "right" - it is just our way of managing an environment to provide the best outcome.
My personal opinion is that there is nothing wrong with IIF or ?: if you know what you are doing with them.
That's my final thought.
Gary
On Mon, 06 Dec 2004 14:22:42 -0800, Spike <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I agree with pretty much all of what you say Gary, but the point I was trying to make was that this wasn't the standard at a single organization. It was the standard at pretty much every large organization my brother in law has worked. He's worked for a lot of banks and a couple of hospitals, environments where mistakes can have pretty dire consequences. Given that most of these places held similar coding standards it's indicative, but not proof, that there was more to it than lack of understanding of the consequences. Quite the opposite I would guess.
Spike
Gary Menzel wrote:
Actually - I have worked at some large organisations similar to those mentioned and I can tell you that, in those cases, it was often ignorance or fear that caused language features to be banned in coding standards. They were often written by people who didnt understand the languages they were setting standards for.
So it is incorrect to assume that they were set based on experience. Referring to standards of other companies and assuming they are correct because those companies have a high profile should be questioned.
The standards may have been set during the companies infancy in the language and they wanted to make a controlled, gradual transition and stick to "familiar" constructs.
One example I will give (without naming the Australian Government agency) was a situation where "experienced" OO programmers (who knew C and C++ well enough - along with other OO languages such as Smalltalk) who were able to write OO extensions to C (using macro's similar to what Microsoft eventually used for transitional code from C to C++ for their OLE platform) were provided the Borland C++ compiler and told "DONT USE ANY OF THE OO FEATURES". And all the OO related libraries were removed to ensure that "accidents" wouldn't happen.
And the only reason they could give for doing it was "WE dont understand it well enough". Note the emphasis on WE. This came from people in the organisation who probably didnt even know the C language either.
And, just for reference, this was back in 1990 and I was one of the people involved in the actual work (i.e. so I the story comes first hand). Now all you have to do is work out where I was working in 1990 and you'll know who I am talking about.
Dont get me wrong. Coding standards are good. But sometimes they are formuated out of fear and misunderstanding and should always be regularly challenged to ensure that the grounds on which they were formulated still stack up against the knowledge and information gained over time. And, if you are going to adopt the coding standards of any other organisation, you should always challenge the premise under which they were made and see if that applies to your organisation.
Regards, Gary Menzel
On Mon, 06 Dec 2004 11:36:07 -0800, Spike <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
They were fired for using ?: which was explicitly banned by the coding practices. I should probably have made that clearer.
The point I was trying to make (unsuccessfully by the look of it) is that large organizations which have far more experience than I do of writing software often have very strong opinions that what you're advocating is a bad idea. I'm not sure how they formed those opinions, but I'd bet previous experience played a big part in it.
Spike
Adam Cameron wrote:
If being fired for not following coding practices is something that you don't think is significant then you clearly have a different perspective to me.
Well you didn't say they were fierd for not following coding practices, you said they weer fired for using the ?: operator.
If "not using it" was in the coding practices I had to adhere to, then sure; I'd not use it. However if I was in the position to do something about the coding practices, I'd be seeing to it they were at least reviewed, because I don't think that part of them is particularly well-thought-out.
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-------------------------------------------- Stephen Milligan Code poet for hire http://www.spike.org.uk
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-------------------------------------------- Stephen Milligan Code poet for hire http://www.spike.org.uk
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