Re: The Obfuscated Ada Contest (was Re: An admittedly biased ...)

[alex@MIMSY.CS.UMD.EDU (Alex Blakemore)]

In article <1992Oct22.080735.19815@intrepid.com> gary@intrepid.com (Gary Funck)
 writes:
>   My point here is: if some degree of abstraction is good,
>   a very high degree of abstraction is not always better.

same could be send for medicine, desserts, and Keynesian economics

I always loved the term that Doug Bryan introduced in his Dear Ada column:

  abstraction inversion

to describe the phenomenah of layering inappropriate amounts of 
complex interface to obscure a simple system.
such as a generic object oriented task-safe cached priority heap to represent
a constant size string.  its poor design, and unfortunately people often
hide poor design behind elaborate interfaces and buzzwords.

As a gross generalization: I'ld say C programmers too often ignore interface
issues and dont worry enough about abstraction and information hiding,
while being overly obsessed with implementation detail and efficiency.
And Ada programmers too often do the opposite - become obsessed with elaborate
interfaces and overly complex structures while ignoring implementation and
efficiency issues.  C programmers too often think the best names have less than
4 characters, while Ada programmers too often think the best names have more th
an 40.

The best programmers in either language, try to balance both concerns.


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Alex Blakemore alex@cs.umd.edu   NeXT mail accepted