begin quoting Todd Walton as of Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 08:54:52AM -0500:
> 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.
This is why it's vitally important to stay away from the koolaid. :)
> What I hate about scripting in Windows is this "object" orientation.
Leave it to M$ to take something reasonably nice ("object" orientation)
and turn it into something nasty. If you're trying to "script" in an
an OO manner, you /don't/ want to do:
> Every damned thing I call is returned to me as some kind of unique
> object to be learned all over again.
The difference between this and formatted text is what?
Probably that you can *look* at formatted text and make a reasonable
guess as to what's what. With an OO system, you ought to be able to
introspect the object to see what it is and what it can do (can you
tell I like the idea of Smalltalk?).
> 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")
WTF?
Is this a function or a local method?
And it's taking a STRING argument?
> 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.
Oh, collections aren't that bad. Arrays are nonintuitive -- I spent some
time explaining arrays (and other things) to a high-school student this
spring, and it was a bit more work than I had expected. Arrays are easy
because we've internalized them.
> 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.
Well, if the creator of the formatting string doesn't have a consistent
format, text-processing gets a lot less useful. (I've dealt with this
just recently -- the text format *changes*, contrary to documentation
and previous samples, according to some unknown "logic".)
> 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.
Did Rand originate this, or merely rebrand it? I've heard this for
years, and this is the first reference to Rand that I've seen in
connection to the idea.
> Microsoft doesn't *want* you to
> effectively think, it *wants* you to keep coming back to the
> reference. i.e. Microsoft.
I don't think they care about you coming back to the reference, but
they *do* want you to internalize their approach and viewpoint, as
that's a REALLY effective mindshare lock-in.
I used to complain about this, but now I'm not so sure... I WANT the
MS viewpoints to be distinct and incompatible with everything else.
--
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, Exult.
Stewart Stremler
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
