Re: instanceof NOT (always) bad? The instanceof myth.


"Twisted" <twisted0n3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1151006787.604803.45500@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Chris Smith wrote:
The problem with "design by committee" (in the way that the term is
normally used, which actually doesn't much apply to Microsoft as I
understand it from friends who've worked there) is that you bring in a
bunch of people with vested interests in certain design decisions and
begin a huge compromise process.

For example, you want to write a next-gen OS, and invite all the big
businesses to a table to suggest features. Users want to be able to do
anything they want. The entertainment industry wants to have root-level
control over what can be viewed, copied, etc. when, even over a
system's administrator's wishes. The OS vendor itself wants to
gratuitously make migrating to any other OS difficult, so proposes
obfuscated APIs that don't function precisely as publicly documented,
though internal documentation of their real contracts prevets this
being a problem for their in-house application developers. Third-party
application developers want clearly-specified, well-behaved APIs.
Government agencies and law enforcement want snoopable backdoors and
key escrow anywhere encryption is used. Users and encryption vendors
don't...

The result of course is a huge mess, which will be glossed over by
giving it a pretty-sounding name, such as some nice harmless herbivore
like maybe a longhorn, or something suggesting a huge panorama of
wonderful options, such as might be termed a "vista" ...

Hrm. I thought you said Microsoft didn't do design by committee? ;)

I don't think the government, third party application developers and the entertainment industry actually ever really participated in the design of Vista. They may have requested certain features, but Microsoft was free to ignore those requests.

Otherwise, it's like saying "the lever"/"the inclined plane"/"some other elegant machine" was designed by committee, because I requested for a feature to be present in that machine, and thus I participated in its design.

"Vista is a mess, therefore it must have been designed by committee" is, of course, fallacious reasoning.

- Oliver

.

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