What was that story about the WinHelp pen-writing-in-book animation?

re: What was that story about the WinHelp pen-writing-in-book animation?

jwraith — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 20:22:00 GMT

"[I'm so awesome, I answered your question four years before you asked it. -Raymond]"

And you say you don't have a time machine, eh? ;)

re: What was that story about the WinHelp pen-writing-in-book animation?

John "Z-Bo" Zabroski — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 19:40:01 GMT

Re-reading my comments, they were indeed clumsy and confusing. They were not connected to the OP. Apologies.

re: What was that story about the WinHelp pen-writing-in-book animation?

John "Z-Bo" Zabroski — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:19:14 GMT

@Eric Lippert

@Developers would do well to remember that what we should actually be optimizing for is *profitable production of things of value*.

Parametric polymorphism is poorly understood.

@Raymond Chen

@[That's why you hire people smart enough to understand the rationale behind the principle so that they don't turn good advice into bad advice. -Raymond]

I disagree. If I were interviewing somebody, I would want to see how effectively they used parametric polymorphism and avoid inheritance. You hire people who can isolate invariants and encode those in general algorithms. In this way, those invariants become execution requirements independent of implementation and also independent of use case. If there is a change to the invariants, then that tells the developer the problem domain information has changed and the model needs to be revisited. CIL allows both modeling techniques, but the .NET Framework Design Guidelines specifically encourage developers towards using sealed base classes (in other words, maintaining proper object-oriented generalization/specialization relationships between classes).

Testing for people who "understand the rationale behind the principle" is a second-order effect you can't detect in an interview. So you can't hire for that. You should test for people who can demonstrate the principle as a deeply ingrained practice in how they craft a system. This is like an architect observing an electricians clean wiring work of an electrical panel and using a snapshot of the work as a "this is how your electrical contractors SHOULD be providing service to you" demonstration for his students.

[I have no idea what today's topic has to do with parametric polymorphism. Please don't try to explain. -Raymond]

re: What was that story about the WinHelp pen-writing-in-book animation?

PhilW — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:04:34 GMT

I sounds like another case of:

"More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.” - W.A. Wulf

or:

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified" - Donald Knuth

re: What was that story about the WinHelp pen-writing-in-book animation?

mikeb — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 01:22:40 GMT

"[I'm so awesome, I answered your question four years before you asked it. -Raymond]"

I see you finally got your time machine. Soon all will be right with the (Windows) world.

Unless... "Stupid bug! You go squish now!"

re: What was that story about the WinHelp pen-writing-in-book animation?

Roland — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 01:14:49 GMT

@RobertWrayUK: Funny, you're right! I was in fact the person who commented on the original post by Raymond in 2006. I had forgotten this but of course also that Raymond already had answered the question in the first place.

And now you know that the first thing I do when using a new Outlook is emptying the Deleted Items folder to see if the animation issue is still there. And it is! The irony is that with Outlook 97 under Windows 95, we had nice smooth animations on our Pentium 60s. Now with Outlook 2010 under Windows 7 on our quad-cores, the app seems to hang, and the 4th core always begs me: "Don't you have a thread for me to work on? It's so boring in here!" And I always reply: "Be glad and wait until the next Outlook or Common Controls 7 come along, hopefully..."

re: What was that story about the WinHelp pen-writing-in-book animation?

Gabe — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:06:48 GMT

Mihai: The German edition isn't tested just to cover most Latin scripts. German is used because it tends to have the longest words, making it obvious when somebody has created a dialog box without enough space for labels, images that can't fit their text, and that sort of thing.

re: What was that story about the WinHelp pen-writing-in-book animation?

Robert Wray — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:34:25 GMT

[I'm so awesome, I answered your question four years before you asked it. -Raymond]

And someone, quite possibly the *same* someone, called Roland, commented on your linked posting saying "For example, when emptying the Deleted Items folder in Outlook 2003, the animation performs poorly and sometimes appears to hang. Even in Explorer, the animations sometimes get stuck before they continue."

re: What was that story about the WinHelp pen-writing-in-book animation?

rs — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:19:19 GMT

Presumably, in situations such as these you can't really separate programming from localization: Whatever you use to generate the animation in the first place requires some programming skills (unless you are willing to draw 120 frames for 20+ localized versions by hand), but also, as pointed out, localization skills.

re: What was that story about the WinHelp pen-writing-in-book animation?

Roland — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 05:23:48 GMT

A problem with the animation control starting with Common Controls 6 was that it no longer used a separate thread but always just a timer for the animation. A famous program affected is Outlook.

Outlook 2003 was the first Outlook version that used Common Controls 6 (for Visual Styles support), and beginning with that version, the animations in Outlook during lenghty operations were no longer real animations. Try emptying the Deleted Items folder in Outlook 2003 or later: You will see just 2-3 frames of the "animation"! This hasn't improved in Outlook 2010 either.

I never understood why the automatic separate thread was removed from the animation control of Common Controls 6. I guess Raymond knows why...

[I'm so awesome, I answered your question four years before you asked it. -Raymond]