Jeff Winkworth’s IMM Blog

While in class today we discussed Functions and Methods in AS3. I was taken aback when i saw this:


public class myClass {
    public function Programming() {
        function myFunction():void {
        }
        myFunction();
    }
}

That blew my mind! How is this object-oriented? I thought AS3 was supposed to be a step forward in OOP-based standards. Instead, Adobe is enabling spaghetti code. If you need to reuse a block of code, why not make it private? That way you can re-use that piece of code anywhere whenever you need it.

Yesterday during AD, we wrote “our first ActionScript” program. While to me the code-behind was nothing new, one thing that bothered me was the Flash layout, in particular the “compile code” feature. As in most IDEs (such as VS.Net) this feature will compile and run your current iteration of code straight from the development environment. However, being used to VS, I found numerous times throuhgout the day I was running my application without changes; in VS hitting F5 will save all documents and compile, while in flash hitting ctrl+enter will just recompile without saving. I imagine that this will take some getting used to.

It is little differences like this that make people wary of learning computer programming.

So I have a blog now. I don’t really have much use for one, as I’m not all that interesting a person. I don’t discover new techniques or concepts, or discuss programming theory and applications, or even find amusing links or tutorials. I could start doing these things, and I’m sure maybe once and a while I might, but in order to do that, you need to have something to add to the conversation.

I’d like to at least make one post per day of class (so tuesdays-fridays), but I don’t think anyone out there really wants to read “all about little Jeffy’s day at school.” Those are precisely the type of blogs that I don’t read. That would mean that I would need to give insightful discussion regarding something learned (or not learned) that day. But then we move to the topic of “what constitutes insightful discussion?”

This blog has been created at the request of Dan (hereby known as Dan the Man), with an attempt to (i guess) inspire us to reach out and communicate with others not only in our class, but around the world. Obviously discussing course-related materials is a given, but where to draw the line? I guess time will tell, as I try to get better at collecting my thoughts.

I presume that I will also use this blog for non-educational purposes. Perhaps mini film reviews will make their way online. Over at the naature forums, there is a “20 second movie review” thread where I occasionally post; maybe I’ll begin to move those over here as a more permanent record.

I’m also hoping to figure out how to incorporate this blog onto anti-pattern’s main page. I’m pretty new to Wordpress as demonstrated in my first post, so that should be an interesting goal to try and figure out. anti-pattern is in dire need of a redesign; I quickly threw up a layout just to get something online while I got the back end code working. Most of the code is fully alive now; so now I need to make it pretty.

I think most of the time I’m just going to just stop writing, instead of coming up with clever sign offs.