Re: I freaking HATE var!!

Jon,

Admittedly, I didn't think that you didn't have experience. It was
meant to be humorous. I mean "it ain't just static". I give you gold I
tell you, gold! =)

Thank you for the response. It's something I appreciate a great deal.

--
- Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]
- mvp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Jon Davis" <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:u9Y9bssfHHA.2640@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Nicholas,

Bravo. Yours is the kind of response I highly admire and respect. You
don't patronize nor insult me. You examine what I have to say, not who I
am or how well I'm doing (although the "welcome to the world of software
development" comment was a little presumptuous of a lack of experience
with the industry, but I'll take it tongue-in-cheek). And your response
went well beyond the level of appreciable merit than my light-hearted
melodrama (which was sincere nonetheless).

I'll take your thoughts to heart.

Thanks,
Jon



"Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]" <mvp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
in message news:OAjdHOqfHHA.2432@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Jon,

See inline:

a) our team would be forced to withhold ourselves from taking advantage
of other 3.0 features than what var uses,

No, you won't. You can eschew var, as well as extension methods, and
the syntax that translates queries from the C# 3.0 language and actually
chain the static method calls yourself, passing anonymous delegates and
known types as the return. Granted, it is going to be a ROYAL PITA but
it ^IS^ possible.

b) I personally, and the other engineers on our team, would be presented
with an unpredicted and undesirable dillemma of whether to offer
engineering services, whether to the public or to an employer, as a C#
2.0 purist or as a C# 3.0 cutting edge Microsoftie who drinks all the
kool aid that gushes out of the fountains of Redmond and participates in
the very bandwagon that will ultimately make a mess of the output of C#
coders everywhere, and

Well, welcome to the wonderful world of software engineering. "It
ain't just static" should be the motto. That's just the nature of the
beast. There are ALWAYS going to be new technologies that are coming out
and you, being a professional in the field, will have to decide on how
you want to leverage those technologies in what you do to provide for how
you make a living. You aren't the first person to have to face this, and
you won't be the last.

c) put in context, the point was, add us to the list of people who don't
subscribe to the appreciation of 'var'. "Don't like it, don't use it,"
phooey, what are you doing here? I'm here to discuss this sort of
stuff--even if in a monologuish soapbox stance. :p

I was trying to respond to what was a predominantly rhetoric-filled
post. Granted, you have some very valid, and very good points, some of
which I agree with (VS being able to generate known types) and some which
I don't agree with (var is evil). However, the rhetoric gets in the way

However, in order to get projections to work, there is no way around
var.

Yes. There is. Auto-generate the inferred type information directly in
the code rather than at compile time. Actually, you and others talk as
if projections were a necessity in themselves. What I'm getting at is,
if 'var' is the necessity of a new feature, my hatred of 'var' is
greater than that feature. I loved the LINQ idea, but that was when I
heard about C-Omega as C#-based language, not as C# v3, supposed
successor to the language I work with everyday.

Doing work with SQL, you realize that projections become necessary
VERY quickly. Ok, I don't want to be absolute. COULD you get away
without having them, yes, absolutely, but again, ROYAL PITA. I'm not
against doing something that takes a lot of work because it is the right
thing to do, but LINQ here is trying to bridge that gap between the
relational and procedural models. The relational model (as represented
by the implementation of the SQL standard across many database products)
depends heavily on projections. It's something that they probably feel
they couldn't leave out.

Now, I agree, I do hope, and expect, quite frankly, that VS.NET will
be able to take your anonymous types and make known types. If it has
that facility, then you can still code in your 2.0 style, and pass back
IEnumerable<known type> as the return values of the calls to the LINQ
library functions (you might have to cave and use the assignment feature
in C# 3.0 though).

However, this is what I meant by you shouldn't depend on tools to fill
in the gap where the language fails. You can't expect that everyone will
have VS.NET installed. Hell, I've written code in notepad before, others
write code in Eclipse, someone is writing C# code in Emacs as well.
Those tools can not be depended on to support the feature.

Not that bad? I spend half my coding time already pulling my hair out
looking at other people's lazily written or generated code--XML node or
Control lookups that should have been referenced by name or ID are
instead referenced by index, referenced ASP.NET control names plopped in
with namespace of "uc1" rather than origin, variable names as numbered
type names rather than purpose, little "thorn in the side" things that
make my job one minor bit less enjoyable. And now 'var'? Ugh.

You see the potential for abuse here because of the ways that other
technologies have been abused in the past by people that don't have an
understanding of those technologies.

I get that, completely. I respect it tremendously.

There are always going to be people who don't know what the best way
to do things are. The ones that do it out of ignorance which they choose
to perpetuate are never going to advance in this field, while the ones
that are not ignorant are going to learn and perpetuate (hopefully) best
practices.

If the case where that as a society we restricted all growth and
innovation because of the potential for abuse of those innovations, then
we would still be living in caves without fire.

So this leads to what I think you and your team should do in respects
to C# 3.0. Don't give up on it, and certainly don't throw it away. You
are throwing away a HUGE amount of benefit for one simple language
feature which you don't like, don't have to use, and can get around and
still gain the benefits of.

For example, say you had your class:

public class Customer
{
public string Name;
public int Age;
public string Address;
}

And you wanted a query that returns just the name and age. Well,
hopefully the tooling will support it (from anonymous types), and if it
doesn't, you can always code by hand, the following:

// Ok, the naming here is abhorrent, but that's not the point.
public class PartialCustomer_Name_Age
{
public string Name;
public int Age
}

And then you can perform your query on an IEnumerable<Customer>
implementation (like an array) like this:

IEnumerable<PartialCustomer_Name_Age> query =
from c in customers
select new PartialCustomer_Name_Age(){ Name = c.Name, Age = c.Age };

No var at all!

LOL .. well we differ here :) I use the weekends to zoom out and ask
myself questions like what the heck am I doing it all for.

Money? You like it? The women?

While I am making light of it, I do hate the idea of seeing someone in
this profession asking these questions because of something they don't
like, when there is so much more about this field which can be enjoyed.

Kind of like anything else. =) Enjoy the weekend.

--
- Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]
- mvp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx




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