Morning Coffee 44

  • I got my Tecra M4 back sans flaky motherboard. That’s my full time laptop now – it’s nice to have a laptop that supports Vista. I’m still running XP on my desktop out of a combination of lack of video driver + laziness. I run dual monitor with my primary monitor rotated to be portrait instead of landscape. Easier to read websites and documents that way. Unfortunately, while there’s a generic WDDM driver for my video card’s chipset, it doesn’t support the rotate function. But according to the Dell support site, they released a new driver for my card a few weeks ago so maybe it’s time to try the upgrade again.
  • I sat down to watch Heroes last night, forgetting that it’s not on again until April. Watched 24 instead, but it has really jumped the shark.
  • Scott Guthrie continues his series on new Orcas language features, this time covering extension methods. On the one hand, it’s pure syntactic sugar. On the other, how sweet it is. It’s kinda surprising that no other mainstream language has done this before.
  • Scott Hansleman is a self-described managed code snob. What do you call the opposite of a managed code snob? An unmanaged code snob or a managed code bigot?

Comments:

How mainstream is Ruby on Rails for you? Ruby is a full fledged dynamic language. No hacks for "extension methods".
Ya, I kind of blanched at that statement too...method_missing is pretty mainstream... Scott HanSELman.
I'd just like to point out that extension methods are more than just syntactic sugar. Sure, if you have the source to a class and can add a method, then an extension method is just sugar. But if you are adding a method to a class to which you do not have the source, or cannot touch the assembly, then it is much more than syntactic sugar. Well, ok, it is still just sugar, but it is REALLY GOOD sugar.
What about JavaScript? String.prototype.trim = function() { return(this.replace(/^s+/,'').replace(/s+$/,'')); }