• Open Menu Close Menu
  • Apple
  • Shopping Bag
  • Apple
  • Mac
  • iPad
  • iPhone
  • Watch
  • TV
  • Music
  • Support
  • Search apple.com
  • Shopping Bag

Lists

Open Menu Close Menu
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Lists hosted on this site
  • Email the Postmaster
  • Tips for posting to public mailing lists
Re: The Problems with NSController
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: The Problems with NSController


  • Subject: Re: The Problems with NSController
  • From: "Alastair J.Houghton" <email@hidden>
  • Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2003 21:26:19 +0000

On Sunday, October 26, 2003, at 08:45 pm, Brent Gulanowski wrote:

On Sunday, October 26, 2003, at 03:09 PM, Chris Hanson wrote:

Experienced programmers know that every line of code is an opportunity for more bugs, and prefer to minimize the amount of unnecessary code to accomplish a particular task.

[snip]

What you are really saying is that it saves lazy programmers the work of doing their own software engineering. Just think how much coding I would not have to do if I were not a programmer at all!

No, I think Chris means that NSController is a generic, reusable class (although as Aaron says, it isn't as reusable as he'd like), rather than the task-specific class that most programmers would write for this purpose. I tend to agree with the comment about bugs, also. If you were writing the code for this yourself, OK, you might choose to write it in a similar way to NSController, and have generic support (although it'd be hard to integrate with Interface Builder, since you aren't Apple)... but Apple have the advantage in terms of bug detection and bug fixing; not only have they (reportedly) spent somewhere in the region of $14m developing (and presumably testing) Panther, but they also have bug reports from all of us. If I, as a lone developer, implemented similar functionality, just for my applications, I wouldn't get as many good bug reports as they will.

In programming, laziness is a virtue ;-) Less code to do the same task is almost always better, whether in terms of performance, probability of bugs, ease of maintenance, robustness to change, or even just time to market. There are, of course, exceptions (algorithmic optimisations, for example, often result in more code rather than less), but in my experience they are just that... exceptions.

Kind regards,

Alastair.
_______________________________________________
cocoa-dev mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/cocoa-dev
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.

References: 
 >Re: The Problems with NSController (From: Brent Gulanowski <email@hidden>)

  • Prev by Date: Re: The Problems with NSController
  • Next by Date: Re: Strange error
  • Previous by thread: Re: The Problems with NSController
  • Next by thread: Re: The Problems with NSController
  • Index(es):
    • Date
    • Thread