Re: multiple inheritance in Java
On 7/5/2013 3:26 PM, Lew wrote:
Jim Janney wrote:
this has turned into a strength for the language: you can pull a
third-party library library into a project and expect that it will work
That had better be a strength of every third-party library in every language
for every platform, hm?
You just made a reply to first half of the sentence without including
the second half.
Whoever told you that half sentences in English would make sense
was wrong.
with and follow the same conventions as the rest of the code. There are
Code conventions and a library's utility are weakly correlated, I venture.
There are certainly more important factors.
But following convention do make the library easier to use.
I mean, perhaps it does, I just don't see its help to code quality. In
decades of working on other peoples' code, the most "individual" code has
been the most bug-riddled and difficult to maintain.
That is the flip side of his point.
There certainly is a lot of room for style in Java coding, but if you follow
good engineering practices rigidly there will tend to be commonalities with
so-called "conventions". You're going to write complete, thorough, informative
Javadoc comments as a matter of habit. You're going to use get/set methods.
You're going to use a lot of read-only, final, immutable types. You will tend
to use generics. You're going to indent consistently, if not conventionally.
You're going to use version control even for solo projects where you are
producer, director, cinematographer, stars and extras. Every input will be
checked for boundary conditions. You probably even will have written various
sorts of useful tests. And this is true whether you're using Java or the useful
idioms and practices of some other platform.
Some conventions are good in some objective sense.
But other conventions are only good because everybody else
uses them.
Arne