Forum OpenACS Development: Re: ad_parameter deprecated in favor of parameter::get?

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34: Re: ad_parameter deprecated in favor of parameter::get? (response to 1)
Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 08/15/03 03:05 AM
  • If you read the thread I would hope you'll see that I've been trying to "argue on the merits" with concrete examples. But after the third or fourth repetition of the "verbosity = readability" mantra without any substantiation, it's gotten kind of old. And yes, there is such a thing as good style. In Tcl as well as in C; sorry if this assertion offends you but there it is.

  • I'll leave the pissing contest to you. (And tammy, who, not I, is the source of the 15 years quote.) Impressive that you were using C a year after it was first used to write the Unix kernel for the pdp-11, and four years before The C Programming Language was written.

  • "Any style used consistently is better than the current situation." But, "we're not going to go change all the existing API." Backwards compatibility is a good goal but in the absence of perfect foresight things like upgrade scripts and deprecation become necessary. I would suggest that a single style could be implemented relatively easily by leaving the old procs around for one release after they are deprecated -- then removed. e.g. if ad_parameter is deprecated in 4.6.1 and 4.6.2 is subsequently released, 4.6.3 should remove it. Deprecated functions that have a halflife of several hundred years don't cause any up-front pain, because nobody has to change code, but if you look at the progression of Java it's clear that leaving literally thousands of deprecated classes and methods around is starting to cause serious developer confusion. There's nothing wrong with making someone who doesn't want to run his code through a sed script stay on the 4 series if the 5 series has the deprecated functions he used removed. (Serious question: how many sites upgrade more than once? Is it even really a big issue with clients?)