On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 3:26 AM, SJS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Misleading lead-in... the article is *actually* about parsing text with
> a more-or-less M$-equivalent to find and grep, and does a good job of
> showing why I consider "the M$ way" to be deep in claw-your-eyes-out
> territory.
I've been scripting in Windows for a couple of years now, and I assure
you it's not the eyes that are the first to go. It's the various bits
of brain matter that regulate morality and decency.
What I hate about scripting in Windows is this "object" orientation.
Every damned thing I call is returned to me as some kind of unique
object to be learned all over again. There are classes of objects,
several of them, but they overlap in strange ways. For example, to
get the arguments to a script written in VBScript, you must first:
Set objArgs = CreateObject("WScript.Arguments")
and this objArgs object is given to you as... what? A string? No.
An array? That'd be convenient. Get the argument you want as
objArgs[1], etc. Nope. It's a "collection". To use it you'd:
for each strArg in objArgs
next
and test for each strArg in the loop, pulling out what you want.
How's a person supposed to remember this? Repitition, I guess. But
my point is that each object has its own properties and methods and
whatever else, and everytime you use one you have to go looking it up
in a reference source. Or else give up and stick with what you know,
which limits your flexibility.
This violates Ayn Rand's "crow epistemology", where a mind can hold
only a certain number of unrelated or identical things before it has
to switch to a different abstraction. Microsoft doesn't *want* you to
effectively think, it *wants* you to keep coming back to the
reference. i.e. Microsoft.
-todd
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