On the usefulness of Livejournal

[jennyaxe]

Just when I was feeling somewhat ashamed for starting my day at work reading Livejournal, I come across this link on what Hungarian notation should be in bcholmes journal. Since what I'm working on is a bigger project than I'm used to, and one which I'm basically starting from scratch, stuff like that really comes in handy.

I've even dug up one of my old books from when I was at the university learning systems design. It'll come in handy for designing the database. The one I'm replacing was a proof-of-concept thingy, where the logs were just slurped into tables with one column per field and an index on every column. I'm fairly sure I'll be able to do something better than that!

Comments

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

It's still about sticking the type onto the variable.

Ironically without making use of different types for your actual safety.

If you're worried about accidentally assigning a "user string" to an "internal string", and think that training your brain into be a Perl taint substitute, then you're doing things wrong. If your language has types, then make them different types. And in any case, make the user input safe at the boundary. Don't carry it inside your system. Full stop.

(I've not had the full opportunity to read the entire article. I'll do that later. But it appears to be reiterating the same sad arguments I've seen refuted several times before.)