posted on Tuesday, October 26, 2004 6:07 PM
by
kevdaly
MSDN Magazine and the Hungarian Notation Scourge
I enjoy reading MSDN magazine: not as much as I used to enjoy Byte or Practical Computing in their heyday, still less AmigaWorld and definitely not as much as I enjoyed reading Microcomputer Printout, a wonderful British magazine from that heroic time in the early eighties when men were men and Space Invaders were frightened (and I was, as God intended, a student of French...I wasn't foolish enough to waste my university days on mind-rotting CompSci).
But as I said, I like MSDN magazine. In every issue I can find plenty of relevant and informative content, and unlike the average issue of your generic Journal For Spotty Twerps With An Unnatural Interest In Prime Numbers, I actually understand what they're talking about. Sometimes I even care.
So it is in a spirit of constructive criticism that I say it would really help those of us trying to lead those we are responsible for into the 21st century if a magazine that many of us see as being to Microsoft what Pravda was to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (and I mean that in a nice way) were to adopt an editorial policy that promoted the coding standards that Microsoft has been urging us all to adopt for the last few years.
I'll often find a useful and informative article that I really, really, want to be able to draw to the attention of a baby programmer (that they may grow wise in the ways of the Force, and all that stuff), but every second article still seems to feature code samples full of "str" this and "obj" that. Sometimes they do it to JavaScript, and that's just sick. And I know from experience that impressionable junior developers exposed to such things will quickly be corrupted and turned to the Dark Side. And that would be bad.
So come on guys, would it really be so hard to adopt an editorial policy that includes gently encouraging contributors to make the minimal effort to conform to recommended coding conventions that have been well publicised for the past three years?