Hey Jody, Great post. On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 7:43 AM, Jody Bevan via 4D_Tech < [email protected]> wrote:
> You are right how we stick to our old habits. We do though because they > have proven to work and sticking with them saves a lot of time. > True but there's retro code that while working and stable is also un-necessary any more or simply overly complicated because it's relying on procedures written prior to certain capabilities 4D even had. I wonder how many folks are still using the old drag and drop commands for instance. > What we have done is to rewrite our shell every so often. The goal is to > make use of all of the new features of 4D that we can, and to try new ways > of doing things. We did this over the last year with v16. We really pushed > out a lot of the way we used to code and did it the new way we decided on. > One thing we did find is that in uncompiled with Team Developer it was > slow. We got concerned. I did notice it was also slower on Stand Alone > developer but not as bad. We do not use global variables on forms (or in > our code), use our own dot.notation in C_Objects extensively, and use > pointers even more than before (and with local variables). > > We finally decided we had better compile it to see what the end user speed > was going to be like. We breathed a big sigh of relief as the code executed > quickly. I suspect that a lot of the new way of coding gets ‘hard coded’ by > the compiler so that it does not have to take the time to create the item > in memory - thus the speed increase. > > Back to the topic of the thread - rewriting our shell though expensive for > us, it helps move our mind set, test out new theories, and keep our code up > to date with the 4D Technology. I agree. I've re-written the main db our company uses three times now in the last 14 years. Started in 6.8, then jumped to 2004 and then to v13. The one from '04 to v13 was hard. In my case mainly because I took that opportunity to correct some structural issues that had come up as the scope of the project increased. It just had to be done. And the benefits are worth it. The size of the code base actually shrank. When you implement the newer functions 4D offers it frequently makes for less code to accomplish the same things. It also allowed me to position the project to interact more with other services. The user experience improves and I'm better able to keep it looking a little more modern than a lot of 4D looks. That's more important than mere aesthetics. The more I can make my interfaces resemble the sort of interfaces they see in their browsers the easier it is for them to use my program. > Testing is critical though. We got bit very badly with SQL when it first > arrived. Once France got involved they identified the cause quickly, and > fixed it. Learned a good lesson there - yet again. > Agreed again. I really do wish 4D did a better job of presenting new technology. And how they intend us to use it as a place to start. Or perhaps more to the point how to transition to it. And why. Again I'll point back to the drag and drop stuff. I recall posting something about how to implement the new form events and the pasteboard but I was looking at it from the context of working with the old commands and trying to understand how adding the new capabilities was a benefit. Which was a complete waste of time. Finally someone, probably Miyako or Josh, flatly told me "just walk away from the old way of doing it - you don't need it anymore." Duh! Light bulb moment. I'm paraphrasing and it was probably nicer but that's what I needed to hear to ditch my old way of looking at it and start fresh. Personally I think 4D walks a tight line on that sort of stuff - not wanting to alienate old projects or make it seem like they _have_ to be re-written. And then, as you say, we've all be bitten by jumping onto something new only to stumble on to some bug. Well, you know what they say, if it was easy to write good code every a**hole in the world would be doing it. -- Kirk Brooks San Francisco, CA ======================= *The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.* *- Edmund Burke* ********************************************************************** 4D Internet Users Group (4D iNUG) FAQ: http://lists.4d.com/faqnug.html Archive: http://lists.4d.com/archives.html Options: http://lists.4d.com/mailman/options/4d_tech Unsub: mailto:[email protected] **********************************************************************
