Re: [tlug] Holy smokes, Unity and Gnome 3 suck worse than I ever could have imagined.

[Pier Fumagalli <pier@example.com>]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 21:51, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:
> Attila Kinali writes:
>  > On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:50:51 +0900
>  > "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> wrote:
>  >
>  > > I've fixed a number of bugs related to butt-ugly practices
>  > > that Java forces on its users (eg, 400KB files that contain only one
>  > > class).
>  >
>  > How does java force you to do that?
>
> I don't know for sure.  The file was from Xerces (Apache middleware?)
>
> I think the problem was that this was a central class that needed to
> provide a lot of functionality, to keep a lot of information private,
> and to be very high performance.  The easiest way to accomplish all
> three simultaneously was to keep adding to that class, and so it ended
> up with all the organization of a large mangrove.  This was 10 years
> ago or so; I suspect that both Java and refactoring technology have
> improved a lot since then.
>
> Anyway, the XEmacs user who reported the problem indicated that
> refactoring of that file was unlikely to happen for several years, so
> would you please fix XEmacs?

As I was one of the folks of the Xerces (which is an XML parser
originally by IBM, then Apache-fied) team, I believe you're probably
referring to our wonderful lexer....

It was a butt-ugly class automatically generated by a
compiler-compiler (a-la Yacc, but before JavaCC existed) and then
manually hammered into submission for performance, definitely not a
pretty sight.

Sorry you had to deal with fixing the editor support :-) If it makes
you feel better, I can *guarantee* you that it was a lot worse for us
to play with that code than for you to have to deal with its XEmacs
support.

    Pier