After a nice sabbatical from blogging I decided to return with a rant that is very near and dear to my heart.
I will freely admit that I am a fairly basic developer. I don’t dive deep into the intricacies of the code but rather just want to make it work. Being a fairly basic developer I expect the basic things to work if nothing else. Now that we’re winding down from a very stressful few months at work we’re getting into the problems that require some creative thinking and I get to an application that could use a fall-through switch statement. Why did someone along the lines think that needlessly limiting developers would be a good thing? I mean who on God’s green earth decided “hey they should use a goto to make a fall-through switch?” WHY!!!. Amongst the development community goto statements are like horrible infectious diseases, yeah we want them out of the general population but keep some around in a lab for future use.
Along the same lines was C#’s inability to multiply a boolean. So they want me to convert a 1 bit number to an 8 bit number to do the multiplicaiton? So instead of multiplying 1 times an integer value I multiply 00000001 times the integer?
If C# and the .Net framework wants people to adopt and make their performance sensitive applications with it they need to pull out the NEEDLESS stops. I understand if some developer couldn’t think of anyone wanting to do some of these things, but I honestly cannot be the first person to attempt these things.
On the same lines but not the same thing necessarily is the inability to edit the UI from another thread. From what I understand this is hard to do properly under the right circumstances. In this case perhaps the .Net developers wanted to obfuscate this better and so decided to make it unusable at the time. This is ok, if you don’t have a way to do it right don’t do it, but don’t put in the stops because you think you’re helping me because you aren’t.