[thelist] CF: TypeOf() ?

rudy rudy937 at rogers.com
Wed Jul 30 22:19:22 CDT 2003


> I wonder what the next phase looks like.

you restrict yourself to only those language features that you know through
your own good judgement are drop dead simple and rock solid reliable

less glitz and snazziness, more sleep at night

not that you should never push the boundaries, just that you need to know
when to cut and run

where does good judgement come from?  experience

where does experience come from? bad judgement

an example from my own past --

you know the reflexive relationship, a table references its own primary key,
e.g. parts explosion, category hierarchy, who-reports-to-whom org chart,
etc.

before there was true recursion in programming languages, you could "fake
it" with certain tricks and special features to make called modules
multi-threadable and so on...

long story short, the deal was to "traverse the tree" from the root to *any
number* of nested levels

i watched a team of really sharp programmers bust their nuts on that for
several weeks

my left outer self-join hard-coded four levels deep was working in a half
hour, kept on working, and the company never did have more than four
levels -- if they had added a fifth, i would've had to modify the sql, big
deal, a matter of another few minutes

the guys with the recursive call never did get theirs working

and i remember the look on the lead programmer's face after he tried to
explain how a recursive call would never need to be changed again, and i
said "so what"

one of my better moments    ;o)


rudy



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