Re: Java and OO Concepts

Joe Pluta skrev:

Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen wrote:

So you like words (four byte values?) as they can be atomically compared instead of the more complex String comparison?

Not to travel too far down this road, but multi-byte compares in i5/OS are pretty low-level, and I don't think it's so much of a word thing. Power chips are 64-bit machines, anyway, so my guess is that if you go that far down anything less than eight bytes is a pretty fast compare.

An RPG aversion against calling subroutines? *B*

Not sure what you mean by this. I have absolutely no aversion to calling subroutines or procedures. Good RPG, especially /free, is every bit as modular as Java or indeed any other language. In fact, I prefer RPG procedures because I can pass multiple input/output parameters; it's a very nice technique.

Or just the subconsious doing continouos microoptimizations? That is really a mind set hard to get rid of :)

I don't ever eant to get rid of continuous micro-optimizations. That's why my code is very, very fast.

Even the fastest code cannot remedy a bad algorithm when problems scale (which they tend to do in time).

I'm glad your code is fast, I am just of the opinion that microoptimizations may make your code less readable so it may be harder to maintain. If you are the only maintainer, great :) Saves time since you know the pattersn you write in.

I'd like to hear them. Get it all out! Feel better!!

Nope. I've done it in the past. The BigDecimal alnoe is enough to kill the entire language in my estimation. Add in a lack of an integrated ISAM database and I get ill thinking about writing real business applications.

Well, Java 6 SDK ships with a database so perhaps it helps a little?

What is so wrong with BigDecimal? That everything must be done as a method call, instead of +, -, etc just works?

But I think the big problem with some Java projects is that the programmers use classes without understanding them, and then someone else builds on those classes, and then someone else builds on those, and by the time you're done you have steaming fetid piles of doo-doo. :) It depends on the programmer, of course. Some programmers are more doo-doo-prone than others.

THis is actually a core issue which we need to solve.

The inflexibility of modern day software. A modern application is so complex that you need to divide it up to be able to mentally cope with it. That has worked well in abstracting away the machine hardware by the operating systems but is failing to work well for developers. You can only get rigid Lego blocks, which allow you to build large things, which can then be put together again to build even larger things etc until you have a real cathedral which in principle can last for a thousand years. We cannot today in software build robust things that can easily be adapted to something else, you can only snap the legos together as intended, not mold them to be another shape.

Plus the ability for a simple thing to make stuff fall down. The NullPointerException is the one I guess we all loathe.

I cannot get a better idea myself, but I believe we are using very sophisticated hammers to problems not entirely unlike nails :)