RE: [xml-dev] DOM or SAX: Sense and Sensibility

["Al B. Snell" <alaric@alaric-snell.com>]

On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Michael Kay wrote:

> I think for many inexperienced programmers, the imperative navigational
> style, where their own program is in control and issues requests to other
> subsystems, is the only model they really feel comfortable with. It's a
> control thing, a perception that the job of the programmer is to tell the
> computer what to do next.

I've noticed in many cases that it requires a certain amount of experience
to be happy about it.

Case in point: guy yesterday at work coding a Swing TableModel in Java.
The TableModel is an interface you implement to provide data for a nice
scrollable GUI table; the table calls methods on the TableModel you supply
to ask for the contents of cells, the number of columns, the number of
rows, etc. He just couldn't hack this - he was writing methods which *he
never called*. That's the key thing. He was always saying "But when do I
call getValueAt()? How do I actually put the result into the table?" and
so on.

>
> Mike Kay
>

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software