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

[Doug Orleans]

Matthias Felleisen writes:
 > 1. Finishing this blog entry convinced me once again that blogs on the 
 > average are stupid.

Well, people on the average are stupid.  I'm pretty sure there's
nothing special about weblogs this way.

 > 4. The argument is incoherent and inconsistent. If you take it to an 
 > extreme, he argues against procedures as well as exceptions and so on. 
 > Just think: if you write x = f(x,y); you need to inspect f to find out 
 > what it does. Clearly that's B.A.D. according to Joel.

Yes, but if you rename it to "usF", you no longer need to inspect its
definition to know that it's "unsafe"!  You just need to know that
"us" means "unsafe", and "unsafe" means "may contain HTML".  I'm not
sure where you'd look to find those definitions, though (in a comment
somewhere, if you're lucky, otherwise it's probably just on someone's
whiteboard somewhere).

I'm surprised you had nothing to say about this rule:

  Don't use macros to create your own personal programming language.

Then again, that's probably a good rule if "macros" means "cpp".

--Doug