May 20, 2010 at 9:15 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Where a Rose is not a rose…
Best wishes,
Phil Factor
May 20, 2010 at 10:20 pm
{
sure it wasn't the waggon and horses pub you were going to, rather than the Wagon and Horses Pub?
}
May 20, 2010 at 10:37 pm
Funny, but I can hear a voice screaming at me somewhere around the back of my head. It's saying 'Visual Basic' ...
May 21, 2010 at 1:55 am
Funny that Ben, just what I was thinking.
A very insightful piece, Phil, struck a chord with me.
Now this may be a little off-topic but understanding what people are asking / describing reminds me of an incident years (and years!) back where three of us from one major Bank IT office were seconded to another in London, and were being shown a demo by someone – lets just call him “Bob”.
This was back in the days where you actually typed "win" to start windows, and Bob typed "win:" so one of us asked "What's the colon for?"
Well Bob started to spiel off what happens when you eat food, going into detail about the large intestine, small intestine, rectum and of course, the colon, while the three of us exchanged silent, bemused and amused glances, not wanting to stop Bob who was in full flow, and obviously thought that the supposed question about the part of the body was completely normal for one of his demos.
Incidentally the colon was to start windows without the splash screen.
May 21, 2010 at 2:07 am
While I mostly agree with the sentiment expressed in the editorial, there is one place where I don't. Where, in fact, I'd even reverse the statement:
"There really is little justification for not having a case-sensitive collation for database on a dev server"
When developing code, you can never be entirely sure what server(s) it will be deployed on. One of them could be neglecting Phil's good advice and using a case sensitive collation. And surely, you would not want your deployment fail because users get bucketloads of "Table cUstOMer not found" errors, because the table is acutally called "CusTOmeR".
Make sure you always develop and test on a case-sensitive server, and you'll never have these problems.
(And an added benefit is that you don't get the confusion sometimes caused by using different case for the same object in the same query).
May 21, 2010 at 2:39 am
Unless we can devise special sounds for curly brackets (open and close), semi-colons and maybe an altered intonation for upper-case
Not sure about upper/lower case, but Victor Borge's phonetic punctuation could fit the bill... (I can't check out video/audio links at work, but you know where to search...)
May 21, 2010 at 2:47 am
How archaic is talking some one through code?
Did you not have a smart device - and type the SQL then electronically send it to the guy so he could just cut and paste the code into place?
No?
How last year are you? 😉
Hiding under a desk from SSIS Implemenation Work :crazy:
May 21, 2010 at 3:07 am
"There really is little justification for not having a case-sensitive collation for database on a dev server"
Hugo, I heartily agree with the sentiment, but I hate to actually recommend having a case-sensitive DEV machine because developers tend to get bored with correcting errors in their perfectly sensible mixed-case object names and just do everything in lower case. I've seen it happen so many times. It is precisely what you want to avoid. What we need instead is a utility that takes the original names in the metadata, complete with their original capitalisation, and creates a script that corrects the case of the names elsewhere in all the code that references the object, according to the original definition. Hmm... Maybe I shall write such a thing. I'm hopeless at remembering capitalisation, which is why I'm hopeless at JavaScript (or is it Javascript?)
Best wishes,
Phil Factor
May 21, 2010 at 3:14 am
Did you not have a smart device - and type the SQL then electronically send it to the guy so he could just cut and paste the code into place?
I'd have given my eye-teeth for a remote app that gives an unpleasant electric shock to the holder of an iPhone whilst you're talking to him, when he is in panic-mode. Like the movies where they give a hysterical person a sharp slap and they're then instantly OK.
Best wishes,
Phil Factor
May 21, 2010 at 5:53 am
Phil Factor (5/21/2010)
Did you not have a smart device - and type the SQL then electronically send it to the guy so he could just cut and paste the code into place?
I'd have given my eye-teeth for a remote app that gives an unpleasant electric shock to the holder of an iPhone whilst you're talking to him, when he is in panic-mode. Like the movies where they give a hysterical person a sharp slap and they're then instantly OK.
Now THAT's progress! Would it work through a bluetooth earpiece?
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How best to post your question[/url]
How to post performance problems[/url]
Tally Table:What it is and how it replaces a loop[/url]
"stewsterl 80804 (10/16/2009)I guess when you stop and try to understand the solution provided you not only learn, but save yourself some headaches when you need to make any slight changes."
May 21, 2010 at 6:11 am
Andy in Pembs (5/21/2010)
Funny that Ben, just what I was thinking.A very insightful piece, Phil, struck a chord with me.
Now this may be a little off-topic but understanding what people are asking / describing reminds me of an incident years (and years!) back where three of us from one major Bank IT office were seconded to another in London, and were being shown a demo by someone – lets just call him “Bob”.
This was back in the days where you actually typed "win" to start windows, and Bob typed "win:" so one of us asked "What's the colon for?"
Well Bob started to spiel off what happens when you eat food, going into detail about the large intestine, small intestine, rectum and of course, the colon, while the three of us exchanged silent, bemused and amused glances, not wanting to stop Bob who was in full flow, and obviously thought that the supposed question about the part of the body was completely normal for one of his demos.
Incidentally the colon was to start windows without the splash screen.
!!!ROTFLOL!!!! :-D:hehe::-D:hehe:
I would have many similar stories, but in Italian. I don't think you'll find them amusing.
-- Gianluca Sartori
May 21, 2010 at 6:24 am
Visual Basic .Net doesn't worry about case sensitivity and if you are using the Visual Studio IDE, it corrects the casing as you type.
So if you declare a variable as MyNewVariable and use it as mynewvariable, you'll see it become MyNewVariable. If you aren't using VS, say in an asp.net page using NotePad or some such, then it runs just fine. C# doesn't - it just sits there and complains that the variable isn't declared.
May 21, 2010 at 6:46 am
Ah, one time I set up a database on my machine at home and was careless when I set the collation to case sensitive. I didn't notice until I was using it and it had trouble finding table names. Never again!
May 21, 2010 at 6:54 am
Despite the fact I'm an ardent Python fan (and LOVE block indentation!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) I can get behind case insensitivity in languages and databases. In fact, except for a very very few instances I can't think of any reason to have computers case-sensitive. Humans tend no to be, after all. 🙂
But T-SQL has its own issues, language wise. Specifically the *lack* of a requirement to end a line with a line break. Putting multiple statements on the same line with a ; is just asking for trouble, SQL injection being a case in point. VB.Net 2008 is edging this way too (boo, hiss).
Back on point, case sensitivity is an artifact of C. Period. Too many programmers learned that abomination of a language (myself included). Thus when it came time to implement anything case sensitivity was a natural assumption, completely invisible to the developers.
The rest is history...
Except for its case sensitivity, Python is probably the perfect language. It fails Phil's test of shouting code across a room to a non-developer, but that's a pathological case anyway. 🙂
May 21, 2010 at 7:11 am
I reply tongue-in-cheek.
But, Phil, it's the case-sensitivity, curly brackets (braces), semi-colons, and other minutia that makes our craft a "black magic" to many. If we didn't required certain special "only WE know how to do it" quirks in our develoment environments, we'd be out of work. 😉
For real, though, I agree that languages and DBs should be case insensitive.
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