On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 7:29 AM, Jess Holle <je...@ptc.com> wrote: > I've heard the saying that you shouldn't dumb down a language for your > dimmest bulbs at the cost of your bright ones. It's not that simple, > though. If you have a sizable team without a *really *rigorous, zealous > code review (and mandatory code amendment) program you're not ready for a > language with features like operator overloading. Sure you can say "don't > use those language features", but unless the language provides a means of > easily enforcing this, you're left to do so manually via heavy code review > or via home-brewed compiler-like tools to reject undesirable language > features -- unless your team is exceedingly small, of course. >
If you're the only one who understands your code, you'll be stuck maintaining it until you leave. There's a a balance to be struck between doing something at your own level vs the level of the group. Sure, you can 'educate' the other team members, but at the end of the day you're not always guaranteed that everyone will grok it, nor will everyone use new features as elegantly or intuitively as you might think. I'm reminded of a situation I worked in years ago where person X was taking incoming HTTP POST data, and person Y (person X's manager) didn't understand the concept of looping through the POST data, and made him rewrite it to be explicit pulls for each piece of data. Dozens of them (60 or 70 IIRC). Arguably this might be better for readability or clarity, but the stated reason was something along the lines of "I've never used loops for this before, and I don't think it will work". The manager was a former developer who "didn't like programming anymore" and was moved in to this team management role. Person X left soon after that encounter. :) -- Michael Kimsal http://jsmag.com - for javascript developers http://groovymag.com - for groovy developers 919.827.4724 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javaposse@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
