Re: The Problems with NSController
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.
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