Re: Hungarian notation

[gdkuch@barrow.uwaterloo.ca (Jerry Kuch)]

In article <4o35bu$ut8@sol.caps.maine.edu>,  <slary61@maine.maine.edu> wrote:
>dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) wrote:
>> Hungarian notation is certainly a remarkable demonstration of how few people
>> have learned and understood data abstraction. What's most interesting is
>> how difficult it is for its advocates to see this point, but I suppose that
>> is not surprising. If you never understood what abstraction is about, then
>> of course adopting a notation that destroys it will not concern you.
>
>Perhaps Bill Gates will be contacting you for that explanation.
>Although the examples you cite support your opinion, the bottom
>line is that some of the largest software developers in the world
>insist on code using Hungarian Notation.  

If you've ever actually set foot at Microsoft, you'd have seen that
there are many people there who elect not to use Hungarian notation
and that among those who do there is a fairly broad mixture of
feelings about it.  The vacuous "appeal to authority" method of
argument doesn't at all address the original posters comments about
how Hungarian notation can in a sense undermine the principles of data
abstraction.  To say that "some of the largest software developers in
the world insist on X" and that as a result of this X is somehow good
is as fatuous as saying that "because politician Y is president he
must be the best at being president and every presidential decision he
makes is going to be right."

This brings to mind something that a lot of people don't get.  Programming
is an evolving subject that moves with both changes in technology and the whims
of its practitioners.  Although there are some ideas that are timeless 
such as "comment your code intelligibly," there are other methodologies
that are introduced to solve a specific problem but that over time can
come to lose their usefuless as languages, tools, standards and programming
paradigms change.  Hungarian notation in the form usually bickered over in
this group may have been a good solution for those working in weakly
typed languages with comparatively spartan support for encapsulation and
information hiding, but in environments with extensive support of these
features and polymorphism, it buys much less at the high level.  Perhaps
in the most deeply buried private members of objects, where the data being
handled is being manipulated in a fairly raw and unstructured, close 
to the hardwarze form, this flavor of Hungarian has a role for making
sure that ours arrays, pointers and bit fields don't get mixed up in our
minds.  In levels of code that manipulate comparatively large and complicated
objects, the final production releases of such code should be focussed on
the defined semantics for the objects and methods rather than on the low
level details of their implementation which, from that level of abstraction,
are probably best hidden.

In programming as in anything, dogma breeds inflexible armies of luddites.
What works well should be used, but one eye should always be kept on the
outside world and how it can sneak up and render the familiar rituals
obsolete.

-- 
  Jerry Kuch  EMail:    gdkuch@mercator.math.uwaterloo.ca, NeXTMail welcome.
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