[PRL] Joel on Software - Making Wrong Code Look Wrong

[Felix S Klock]

On May 11, 2005, at 1:10 PM, Mitchell Wand wrote:

> Interesting reading...  I smell types...  Of course the PLT naming 
> conventions are very much in tune with what he's thinking.

An odd thing is that Joel himself is dragged towards the connection to 
types, because he likens the practice to Hungarian notation, and when 
he discusses Hungarian notation, he makes the following statement:

"In Simonyi’s version of Hungarian notation, every variable was 
prefixed with a lower case tag that indicated the kind of thing that 
the variable contained . . . I’m using the word kind on purpose, there, 
because Simonyi mistakenly used the word type in his paper, and 
generations of programmers misunderstood what he meant."

When you think of "type" as meaning "storage class", then I suppose 
Joel is right to say that Simonyi is mistaken, and that the notation is 
not for types.

But if you think of "type" as "classification according to semantic 
meaning", then it seems like Joel is dead wrong.  Simonyi was right to 
call it a type, and all Simonyi was doing was making up for the 
impoverished type meta language he had available.

(I'm not considering "type" as "proposition about program text", 
because that seems like it could be specialized to either of the above 
meanings)

What is the right way to try to get these ideas into the public's mind? 
  Joel came so close. . .

-Felix

----
"If you're not bored, you're not learning."
  -G.C. Rota (10/16/97)