From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.2 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,6faab3246196bedc X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: xanthian@well.com (Kent Paul Dolan) Subject: Re: How To Write Unmaintainable Code Date: 1999/11/22 Message-ID: <2x8_3.271$aj3.34645@news.wenet.net>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 551568956 References: <814jiq$d8l$1@nnrp1.deja.com> X-Complaints-To: news@wenet.net X-Trace: news.wenet.net 943264958 208.178.101.2 (Mon, 22 Nov 1999 02:02:38 PST) Organization: Birthright Party "The birthright of humankind is the stars!" Reply-To: xanthian@well.com (Kent Paul Dolan) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999 02:02:38 PST Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1999-11-22T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 

In article <814jiq$d8l$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
Ted Dennison   wrote:
>There's a rather interesting website mentioned on /. today titled "How
>To Write Unmaintainable Code" ( http://mindprod.com/unmain.html ).

>My own suggestions:

>   56. - The people who orignially named all the objects and packages
>you use were morons. Rather than try to convice them to change, just use
>renames and subtypes to rename everything to names of your own devising.
>Make sure to leave a few references to the old names in, as a trap for
>the unwary.

Hmmmm.  On that renaming thingy.  I just finished reading a fairly
ancient paper on software architecture design practice that complained
about the tyranny of the fixed module and method names used in
implementing software when that software was reused in a field where
those names were no longer appropriate.  There may be more than one
valid viewpoint on the heavy use of renaming in Ada.

see:
Characteristics of Higher-level Languages for Software Architecture, abstract, and postscript version,
a pretty good analysis of the inadequacies of then (1994) current software architecture design methodologies. 

cited in:
Vitruvius Publications 

[Yeah, I know all this HTML crud is silly in a posting, and _way_ ugly,
but it does, in some newsreaders, make the above links "live", if I'm
lucky, and I tried to use the preformatted text tags to avoid the worst
of the braindamage; if this turns out to work poorly (I use a plain text
newsreader myself), someone warn me, and I won't bother to try any more.]

               ===== random archival quality quote =====

I  walked  away,  overcome  by the refusal or inability of this robot to
distinguish between the natural and the technological.
                       -- Mark Leyner:  My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

--
Kent Paul Dolan.