Christopher Browne wrote:
> Oops! rwelty@averillpark.net (Richard Welty) was seen spray-painting on a wall:
>
>>"Does Not Taunt The Garbage Collector."
>
>
> That is the nicest way I have ever seen of characterizing abuses of
> system features.
>
> In Java, GC is something people are prone to "Taunt."
>
> In C, there's _something_ surrounding malloc() that often gets
> "taunted;" I'm not certain how to characterize it.
>
> In Lisp, the _other_ two things that get "taunted" by bad programmers
> are:
> a) Recursion (when they think that's the _only_ way to go) and
> b) Doing _way_ too much list manipulation using c[ad]+r.
>
> In Forth, the "taunting" of the system tends to come if your code does
> more stack manipulation than "real work."
>
> There's a tendancy for these misuses to lead to code being less
> readable, to boot...
Just to be an irritant, I'd argue that, at least w.r.t. GC, these
are problems for the implementors. I'm not saying it isn't smart to
work around language implementation defects, just as it has been
recommended to people to use ORDER BY LIMIT 1 and, until recently,
EXISTS instead of IN. However, the fundamental problem lies with the
implementors, not with the programmer who should be thinking in
terms of correctness, not visualizing the machinations of a JVM's GC
internals...
Mike Mascari
