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Re: Hidden Variables
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Posted: Jul 12, 2006 1:26 AM
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> I think we are missing the point completely. When you look > at the big picture, the real problem is that our so called > software engineering discipline is not a proper > engineering discipline. More specifically, we don't have a > proper component model for software.
Additionally, we don't have a proper way to write code that writes code. Well, that technique exists in certain languages, but it has not caught up yet with mainstream languages.
For example: many (if not all) GUI applications use dialogs. We code each dialog with much pain, whereas a simple meta-function that was fed the kind of data that we would like to edit and produced the right code would be more than enough.
Can we say to the computer: "edit a number that ranges from 3 to 100 and store it in variable 'foo'" in one sentence? nope, we can't. This simple thing alone takes too much code to write (create the widgets, arrange the widgets, setup the callbacks, setup the validation, setup the persistence etc).
Can we say to the computer: "my persistent data is a list of foo named 'foos' and a map of bar to foo named 'bar', and they are persisted in computer 'a' with username 'b' and password 'c'". Nope, we can't. We have to setup a whole mechanism of mapping databases to objects, open connections, close connections, have connection pooling, write SQL, etc. All these things would propably be possible with code that writes code...then the level of abstraction would greatly increase and therefore the possibility of errors would be minimized.
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