Learn to use your tools
May. 20th, 2009 10:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurPardon the brief frustrated rant:
Actionscript, like Javascript, is a functional language -- not a great one, but it has all the basics. In particular, it has first-class functions, and closures that mostly work correctly. If you're going to work seriously in the language, *please* learn to use these tools: used judiciously, they can make programs vastly clearer and more robust.
(This rant brought to you by my hacking through the thicket of XIFF, the open-source Actionscript XMPP library. It works, and the design isn't bad, but it would require far fewer lines of code if these folks had a little more experience with first-class functions, and used that to refactor away the enormous amounts of boilerplate. If I have one core complaint about Java, it's the fact that most Java programmers wind up with blinders about the power available in the other languages they're working in, and come out writing code with all of Java's usual flaws even when they're not necessary...)
Actionscript, like Javascript, is a functional language -- not a great one, but it has all the basics. In particular, it has first-class functions, and closures that mostly work correctly. If you're going to work seriously in the language, *please* learn to use these tools: used judiciously, they can make programs vastly clearer and more robust.
(This rant brought to you by my hacking through the thicket of XIFF, the open-source Actionscript XMPP library. It works, and the design isn't bad, but it would require far fewer lines of code if these folks had a little more experience with first-class functions, and used that to refactor away the enormous amounts of boilerplate. If I have one core complaint about Java, it's the fact that most Java programmers wind up with blinders about the power available in the other languages they're working in, and come out writing code with all of Java's usual flaws even when they're not necessary...)