Re: newbie question
- From: "Lisa Pearlson" <no@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 19:02:47 +0200
Thank you for your perspective Kevin,
Of course abstraction has several benefits.. not only ease of use,
reusability, increased productivity.. using proven building blocks to build
new things, will benefit the overall stability too..
I don't have a problem with the concept of abstraction itself.. It's the
only way forward.. divide and conquor.
I do have a problem hoewever with the concrete form in which abstraction was
performed by M$. I mean, you can perform abstractions in different ways..
C is a great balance between power, flexibility and yet be human readable..
its efficiency and small code size makes it particularly of interest in
embedded systems.
I guess I value efficiency, not in the commercial sense but only
technological perfection sense (if driving a car is too expensive, you can
either make gas cheaper, that's what microsoft does, CPUs go faster, storage
space increases... or you can make cars more efficient by making them less
power hungry, more optimized, lean and mean).
OO development is definitely a great concept. C++ is that addition to C.
It's served us well for a very long time, and still does to this day..
that's proof that it's a well through through, effective tool.
Then came OLE, OLE2, ActiveX, .NET. Every year millions of dollars are made
on selling books, giving classes, re-educating personell, hiring and firing
people, and paying big bucks to get new certifications. This explains to me
why it's primarily done.. this is market push.. you create a demand that was
never there in the first palce.
The most frustrating part of all is just that with every new layer of
abstraction, which in M$ case seems to also have the benefit of covering up
their clunky bloatware, with a layer of abstraction, .. so the interface
looks clean, but only God (M$) knows what's underneath it all.
It just reminds me very much of the benefit of Chinese characters over latin
alphabet. All we need is to learn like 26 characters, and we can do
everything with them.. but if you use 1 symbol for an entire sentence or
object, like chinese, then you can write more stories efficiently.
Result? There are over 50,000 chinese characters.. great abstraction! You
can be so much more productive now.. you can write whole sentences with just
a few characters.. The only problem is, first you got to learn all those
characters. Calculating in all that extra time and effort, I'm not so sure
it's more efficient.
I much rather have standard storylines, on standard pages, from which you
can write books quicker, than to create a new language with more
abstraction. In other words, new C/C++ libraries, is great.. .NET is not.. I
guess I never liked OLE to begin with, and everything that's been built on
top of that..
"Kevin Spencer" <kevin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ul2BsrqOFHA.1268@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Hi Lisa,
>
> I can certainly understand your position. But let me speak to you as a
> C/C++/C# developer, and let me see if I can explain why I love ASP.Net
> from an old low-level programmer's point of view.
>
> It's all about the programming stack. I started out with C programming on
> the DOS platform, what there was of it! C, as you know, was developed as a
> higher-level language than Assembler, for the same reasons that other
> higher-level languages were developed: productivity. It simply takes too
> long to write a program in assembler. So, in a sense, Machine language is
> the bottom of the programming stack, with Assembler on top of that, and
> the higher-level languages like C on top of that, all for productivity's
> sake.
>
> When I programmed in C, I was always on the lookout for good function
> libraries (DLLs), as having these pre-built functions also enhanced
> productivity. No need to re-invent the wheel every time you write an app,
> eh? And of course I created my own, and eventually had a rather large
> library of DLLs to work with.
>
> C++ took the concept a bit farther. OOP is the next technology on the
> stack. Now you could use encapsulation, abstraction, polymorphism, and
> inheritance, to organize and make your coding more productive. And class
> libraries took the place of function libraries.
>
> Along comes Microsoft with the idea that reusable code was a good thing,
> and they began to build their programming platforms, which were, in
> essence, another layer of abstraction on the stack. Finally, Microsoft
> came out with the .Net platform, and the Common Language Runtime Library,
> which houses literally tens of thousands of classes.
>
> Now, where I think you misunderstand all of this, is that although the
> programming stack has grown quite high, a good programming technology
> should allow one to work at a high level when it is convenient and
> enhances productivity, but also to be able to go down in levels when the
> various libraries reached their functional limit (couldn't do something,
> IOW). You have the best of both worlds. High-level stack for productivity,
> and access to the lower levels when you need it.
>
> You may also be confused due to the fact that the higher-level programming
> stack allows people with little knowledge of programming to put an app
> together, and therefore, attracts many underqualified people to it, where
> a system like Linux or Unix doesn't have that capability, and requires
> more of the developer. However, it should also be noted that development
> on such a system is more costly, due to the lack of ready-made classes and
> platform. IOW, you do have to do a lot of re-inventing the wheel on such a
> platform.
>
> --
> HTH,
>
> Kevin Spencer
> Microsoft MVP
> .Net Developer
> What You Seek Is What You Get.
>
> "Lisa Pearlson" <no@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:%23B8LrZlOFHA.1396@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Thank you for your response.
>>
>> I find that most of my time learning new stuff is wasted on searching for
>> the right info.. and digging through 80% or more of useless chatter
>> around it, yet having to read it all to know what is chatter and what is
>> not.
>>
>> If you're a good programmer, you can make applications robust and
>> scalable without the .NET framework. But since .NET is advertised well
>> and clueless customers want it, I'm pretty much forced to swallow this
>> new technology which is yet again another wrapper around all these
>> microsoft technologies, that I frankly dislike. One reason why I never
>> liked VB. To much behind the screen wiring.
>>
>> Anyway, I should be able to develop something within 1 month, and maybe
>> fine tune things later.. doing the project will be like following a
>> tutorial, where I have to search the net for clues as to how to take the
>> next step. Best way to learn.. But pretty stressful when you have a
>> deadline too.
>>
>> Away from my petty life, back to ASP.NET, you mention "event driven
>> model".. I'm sure all this info is available on the net, but like I said,
>> 80% of my time is wasted on searching for it, so this helps me alot..
>>
>>
>> Question:
>> How should I understand event driven model in web applications? on client
>> side, javascript can handle some events, everything else is usually done
>> via form POST and parsing on the server side, using ASP, PHP or whatever.
>> Do events on the client side get sent to the server? Via HTTP messages,
>> or via DCOM bloat?
>>
>>
>>
>> I've found so many sources dealing with ASP.NET but none that just
>> explain some of the basics of what ASP.NET is really all about. I've read
>> upon some .NET stuff, and it seems little more than a thin wrapper around
>> windows APIs to handle some garbage collection and such.. (to use api's
>> you have to write your own wrappers sometimes.. reminds me of VB, where
>> to do anything useful, required you to import half the windows api's.. so
>> then why not use VC++ instead, I always wondered).
>>
>> Lisa
>>
>
>
.
- References:
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- From: Lisa Pearlson
- Re: newbie question
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- Re: newbie question
- From: Lisa Pearlson
- Re: newbie question
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