6 entries tagged
rant
After a hiatus of a couple of years, here is a new essay
about web development. I’m afraid this time the
experience I am drawing on is
negative rather than positive:
Just say No to webclasses. OK, I admit
this is something
of an obscure topic for a rant—you probably will never
have heard of this particular web-application framework before
today. But it is sadly occuplying all to much of my
working life these days... :-(
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Star Trek tells us more about American foreign
policy than it does about the future. I have recently had occasion to read a couple of
Trek novels for the first time in years and I find that the future society the stories has
set in has become a nasty, cynical place in which the only thing you can depend upon is that
female Vulcans are duplicitous and yet sexy evil-doers.
Read more
PHP is at best a mediocre programming language; it’s only reason for existing is that it is designed for writing HTML pages for web sites. So why is it that it completely lacks any understanding of HTML?
Read more
I am beginning to get a sinking feeling whenever I hear yet another person demonstrating how they can ‘just slap some controls on a form’ to make an almost-working app in minutes, and concluding ‘and all without writing a single line of code’!
Read more
Writing the first draft of a style guide for my employer was rather fun—I got to pontificate. I tried to keep the points to a minimum and mostly cite my favourite books on usage: Hart’s Rules, ODWE, and Strunk & White, mentioning exceptions such as the use of ‘data’ and ‘code’ as mass nouns when referring to the muck that clogs up computers, and the writing of the time as ‘9:05 a.m.’ rather than ‘9.5 a.m.’
Read more
I am still annoyed with Bjarne Stroustrup for naming his C-with-classes
C++ rather than D, P, C2, or Objectastic-C. It isn’t just that no-one
seems to have been able to decide whether C++ code files should be
called foo.cpp, foo.cxx, foo.cc, or foo.C, it is hard to
punctuate sentences mentioning it, and that you end up with names like
C++/CLI, and so on. What makes it worse is that it inspires people to
name their languages things like [incr Tcl], C# (which is spelled C#
but pronounced C♯), and Cω. To say nothing of More
Th<n, Yahoo!, Samsung Ch@t 335, etc.
Read more
