The random utterances of David Arno

A couple of years ago I gained a set of the “periodic table” stickers that Adobe produced. Like many folk I stuck some of them on my laptop. They looked a bit lonely for I limited myself to the four relevant to me. This led to me writing to the likes of Software WTF?, Stack Overflow and the like to get more stickers.

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Most developers these days will tell you that one aspect of object-orientated (OO) best practice is to make member variables private. I contest that they are wrong and that not only is it bad practice, it can force others to have to implement nasty hacks to get around the use of the private keyword.

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Last weekend – 3rd July 2010 – TechCrunch published an article entitled “FaceTime and Why Apple’s Massive Integration Advantage is Just Beginning“. To my mind it is one of the most appallingly fan-boy biased, poorly argued, articles that TechCrunch have published. Yet bizarrely others seem to describe it as an insightful post that argues why endlessly adding new features to products is not a good thing.

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England: a country steeped in a long, complex and often bloody history; the largest of of the set of great countries that make up Britain and a cantankerous arse of a neighbour to mainland Europe.

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For the past few months, I have been occasionally working on a sideline project called AS3Enums. It is a preprocessor for AS3/ Flex/ Flash, which adds powerful enum support to AS3. Being a preprocessor, it is designed to run via ANT, the command line, the “external tools” feature in FlexBuilder, FlashBuilder, FDT etc.

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As a result of two separate lines of thought: currying and simplifying the initialisation of objects, I have come up with a framework that offers curried initialisers for AS3.

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Apple has released a bunch of demo web applications at http://www.apple.com/html5/, which has got many people talking. However they are talking all the wrong things from Apple’s point of view.

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Recently I have been working on an AIR-based project for an AS3 language preprocessor that adds enumeration (enum) support to the language. Today I’m releasing a web-based demo of the project. It can take an enum definition, parse it and either generate an AS3 “enum” class, or report an error if mistakes have been made in the source. The resultant code can then be imported into FlashBuilder etc, allowing the use of enums, rather than lists of numeric constants, in your code.

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I recently wrote an article on why HTML5 is stacking up to be a bad idea and why an Virtual Machine-style solution to web content would be so much better. In that article, I made the claim that JavaScript is a toy language and suggested that few people would argue against this. I have since learned that a lot of people would actually argue against it, claiming that it is a good language really.

To my mind it is self-evident that JavaScript is a toy programming language, but clearly it isn’t self-evident at all. So why do I make this claim and how can I defend it? Read on for the answer…

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