Software Engineering discussion

I agree with the points in this nice essay, which defines some attributes of beautiful code (along with a Ruby plug). I smiled during the discussion on compact, non-redundant variable declarations because here is an example of the lines typically needed in an instance variable declaration in Objective-C:

.h file
UILabel *text;
@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UILabel *text;

.m file
@synthesize text;
...
self.text = nil;
...
[text release:];

Yep, 5 lines of code for one variable!

Nice chapter. Seems a little late in the book. Could have been nice earlier too.

I agree with you UILabel text example. Windows MFC GUI always bothered me, because there's so much setup/overhead. I'm not sure if that's the nature of GUI or not. ASP.Net C# GUI seems like it has alot less unnecessary lines to write to achieve the same results as MFC GUI. I would guess other modern languages have solved this problem similarily.