On 11/02/2012 05:36 AM, Earnie Boyd wrote:
YMMV when it comes time for maintenance by someone other than the code creator.
Consistency helps reduce cost and reducing company cost helps increase my pay
check.
I disagree. A [emphasis on] *foolish* consistency doesn't do anything to
reduce cost. It's something programmers believe helps, then they spend a
lot of time making things consistent for consistency's sake based upon
this myth and thus adds cost not reduces it. Sprinkling syntactic sugar
obscures the clarity of things, again, IMHO.
Don't get me wrong - some forms of consistency are good and do help
reduce cost because readability increases. But syntactic sugar is there
for the computer - not the human.
As for paycheck, I can assure you that mine is at an all time high and
way above the average (like 3x).
Taking a few seconds to use {} to delimit all variables is priceless in the
world of maintenance.
No, IMHO it's wasteful to spend time doing this non-productive activity
when it's the rare case that it is truly needed.
As a native English (American) speaker, I find myself more than once expanding
contractions to make myself more clear about what I want to convey.
And it probably ain't any clearer to anybody. If consistency in language
was that much of a concern and you really wanted to make it such that
you are absolutely clear then you should drop English (
http://defaria.com/Jokes/Plan4ImprovementOfEnglishSpelling.php and
http://defaria.com/Jokes/CrazyLanguage.php) and pick up Lojban (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban). Of course then you'd be talking to
yourself pretty much.
Contractions for contraction sake is not always a good thing.
Nobody said it was. This was an *example* - intended to convey a higher
and deeper meaning. Think about it instead of simply taking it literally.
And with that I think we should end this, pretty much off topic
discussion (take it to email if you'd like).
--
Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
One time a cop pulled me over for running a stop sign. He said "Didn't
you see the stop sign." I said "Yeah, but I don't believe everything I
read."
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