Re: dependent inheritance?

* Juha Nieminen:


Because C++ is statically typed. :-)


This is a different question.

It's not a bad thing per se, for depending on the programming language it can be
a reasonable and practical thing to do.

On the other hand, a horror story from my time as consultant. I wasn't on that
project but I'd had some of them as "students" and one of them came and asked me
what to do when it all went awry. They had three serious technical issues: one
was the choice of Visual Basic for the GUI, the second to implement each class
as a separate DLL (and with umpteen hundreds classes I guess you can imagine how
that turned out), and the third, the use of a dis-ingenious hack to emulate
inheritance or whatever it was by changing vtable pointers on the fly. This
latter meant that they'd forsaken what little static type checking the language
provided, and were effectively lying about static types. It didn't work. But of
course, as almost always, the core issues were not technical but managerial.
Their manager believed in taking shortcuts and was more concerned with
allegiance than quality, so when it all started to turn sour he (it's inevitably
a he that does this) kept the poor consultants working overtime, not allowed
even to participate in obligatory meetings at the firm, so the atmosphere was
pretty charged and panick-stricken and people were simply ineffectual, not
working as a team, so my advice mostly concerned that: the technical white
elephants or what you might call them are often just symptoms.

Cheers & hth.,

- Alf

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