Use your legs, not your back

re: Use your legs, not your back

Tony Cox [MSFT] — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:39:47 GMT

In choosing between "raising" and "firing" an event, it seems to me that "less bellicose sounding" is a far less useful criteria than "doesn't collide with existing common usage".

Since "raising an exception" is common terminology in other contexts, whereas nobody "fires" anything in other contexts that I can think of (well, except for events), surely "fire" would have been a much better choice.

"Triggered" or "activated" might also have been reasonable alternatives.

Sometimes when writing a spec, you need a good thesaurus to hand...

re: Use your legs, not your back

Pavel Minaev [MSFT] — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:59:14 GMT

Oh, if you only knew the woes of translating "raising the event" (or "firing" one, for that matter) to Russian! Or, say, the difference between "statement" and "operator"...

It's actually something worth keeping in mind - no matter how clear you can get it for English speakers, other languages will still have its own problems that you can't really anticipate in advance.

re: Use your legs, not your back

Joe — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:20:06 GMT

@pminaev - you could just do what the Germans do: mangle your language and shove in English words everywhere! Then you end up with lovely expressions like "das Exception throwen" (instead of: die Ausnahme ausloesen) and "das Event raisen" (instead of: das Ereignis ausloesen). It sounds as horrid to the ear as it looks to the eye, but I suppose it's better than when people use the wrong word and end up saying things like "throw the event" which just makes you go "huh?" It also doesn't help that whoever translated the C# reference into German wasn't at all bothered by turning "throw" and "raise" into the same word (ausloesen).

re: Use your legs, not your back

Denis — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:42:25 GMT

@pminaev, @Joe - whatever you do, don't use the online translators: once, just for the fun of it, I tried to type some English text into one such program (can't remember which one), translate it to the Chinese, and then the result - back to English. If only the program is not smart enought to simply revert to your original under such circumstances, the result is really educational - try it yourselves! And don't choose some closely related laguages, like Spanish and Portuguese, or Russian and Ukrainian - that's no fun! :-)

There are many apocryphal but funny stories about machine translation gone bad. Two of my favourite legends: "out of sight, out of mind" (an English idiom meaning "if you cannot see it then you will eventually forget about it") gets translated to Japanese and then back to English, and comes back as "the blind people are insane". Or "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" (meaning "I wish to do something that I am not physically able to do") round-trips through Russian to "the vodka is fine but the ham has spoiled". -- Eric

re: Use your legs, not your back

Steven — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:38:31 GMT

I once accidentally installed the Dutch .NET version on my development PC. It was terrible. The C# compiler errors were all given Dutch. Even terms like "overloaded” (as in overloaded methods) were translated to Dutch. But not a single Dutch programmer uses a Dutch translation of "overloaded" (translated to "overbelast" in .NET) and while I'm Dutch, it was like reading German :-)

re: Use your legs, not your back

Doeke Zanstra — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:32:05 GMT

In vb6 speak, one raises events. So that's a bit old school. But in the entire web, we talk about firing events. Also Google thinks "fire events" (96.8 M hits) is bigger than "raise events" (50.4 M hits). Although substantial, I wonder for how long you can keep it up ;-)

re: Use your legs, not your back

askitanna — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:53:06 GMT

can anybody say me the meaning for the qoute below the title

"Use your legs, not your back"

re: Use your legs, not your back

Daniel Earwicker — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:06:36 GMT

@askitanna - it's good advice when lifting a heavy object.

(I guess a heavy object would be one with a finalizer?)

re: Use your legs, not your back

TubbyHubby — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:19:16 GMT

@askitanna - Whenever you lift (or hoist or raise) something heavy, you should take a stance that allows you to use the strength of your legs, not your back, for safety purposes. In the US, it is very common to simply say "Use your legs, not your back" to describe the entire safe method of getting something heavy up off the ground.

re: Use your legs, not your back

Denis — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:23:54 GMT

The funniest story I ever heard about the machine translations was the name Osama Bin Laden coming out as "Osama the Loaded Rubbish Container" (as an explanation, think the Recycle BIN on your Windows desktop, and the word "laden", adjective, is self-explanatory)

re: Use your legs, not your back

Alex — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 23:50:35 GMT

Hi, Eric

You said that hoising captures local variables (hope I'm not putting words in your mouth), but I did some research of my own and found out that it is not true.

I wrote some code along these lines to look into the matter:

....

var toBeHoisted = 1;
Func<int, int> f = a => a + toBeHoisted;
var before = f(1);
toBeHoisted = 2;
var after = f(1);

....

I would assume that since that variable got "hoisted", a snapshot of it was made in function "f" (it was captured in your words) and variables "after" and "before" should have coincided, but they did not !

Then I wrote this code:

....

var toBeHoisted = 1;
Func<int, int> f = a => {toBeHoisted += 1; return a + toBeHoisted;};
f(1);

....

Again I was in for a surprise, I had thought that variable "toBeHoisted" would not be changed from the anonymous delegate, but it was !

[[ The variable itself is captured, not the value of the variable. When you make a change to the variable in one place, everyone that captured that variable sees the change. Now is it clear why what you're seeing is expected. -- Eric ]]