I did the essence of this with much less code.

Not "the essence" - *an* essence. A mere shadow of this error handler.

You and I might be content with "recycle" and a sad little notification in an error log somewhere, but not this error handler.

When it detected the CPU was failing, it would comb the register for life signs, route around the dying CPU, say last rites, mournfully bury it, and continue on its mission (as well as sending an email to accounting to order a new CPU). If the disk drive had been hit by lightning, it moved fast enough that it would outpace the bolt traveling down the electrical cord, rewire the junction box to send it current into the ground, power up the secondary backup drive, and send a work order to building maintenance to repair the malfunctioning lightening rod on the building's roof.

The database being converted to EBCDIC? Hah! The error handler converted it to Armenian, just to show it could, before converting it Aramaic, then English, then Unicode, and then sending an email to project manager to let him know he could remove the Unicode phase in our legacy database update project.

The error handler's philosophy was clear and built for an earlier age that even then, realized that man would in time become a lesser, diminished being, incapable of understanding the intricacies of exactly how the error should be recovered. As such, it did not depend upon the fallible hands of men to repair an unexpected error condition. It simply handled them *all*.

Alas, even the programmer, in his wisdom, could not foresee the changes that would one day occur, and for those of us who held but a hundredth of the knowledge that he had accumulated in his years of service, we could no more alter his code than a gorilla could rebuild a finely tuned Swiss watch.

And so his code was lost to the knowledge of men (except the revision control system).

I'm sorry. All you have there is good, maintainable, effective program.

What we had, and then threw away, was art made code.

I have not ever seen that done

I have. The coder handled every possible exception intelligently, handled the possible exceptions in the exception handlers, handled the possible exceptions in the exception exception handlers, etc. It was phenomenal. His code could practically handle a CPU burning out at the same time as the primary disk had been hit by lightening while the database had been accidentally converted into EBCDIC.

Unfortunately, it was also completely unmaintainable. No human being, outside of the original programmer, could possibly grok all the conditions, sub-conditions, and contingencies. The code was also 3000 lines of error handling for about 25 lines of normal execution.

It was my privilege to gaze upon the world's most complete error handling before I fulfilled my responsibility of burning it to the ground.

So how do I watch NetFlix without a Gold account? I'm stuck watching it on the Wii rather than the 360.

Windows 7 is the best Windows I've ever had the pleasure to work with.

Windows 8, on the other hand, not so much.

While you can run Mono-based apps on Apache, you are pretty much stuck with IIS for "official" asp.net.

But as far as databases, both Entity Framework and Linq have support for Oracle, MySQL, and several others. So that part of your statement is not quite accurate.

My apologies, I missed your point. I thought you were asserting that you can't classify something as a mental disease unless you can describe the physical mechanism behind it. I was pointing out that we can't describe the physical mechanisms of many physical diseases either.

> My only point is that some mental disorders we don't understand well may well turn out to have physical causes.

Being a materialist, I believe that all mental behavior (both beneficial and adverse) has physical causes. However, I think we're a long way from getting a handle on the mechanisms (I'm not looking for the singularity this century...)

So your fear of losing what you have is making you afraid of what you could possibly gain?

Who is you?

My son's characteristics are classified as Asperger's, but really, I'd just call it personality. If one could recode someone's personality, would they still be, well..., them?

The question of identity is always tricky (Would you volunteer for a Star Trek transporter? Is the person who's reassembled really you?), and the alteration of characteristics by which we define ourselves is always going to be a very personal decision.

I've often wondered about what would happen if we could cure some forms of mental retardation. For significant jumps in neural ability, wouldn't we have really essentially killed of the old person and replaced them with a new one? Every thing that defined the original subject in his or her own mind would likely change. All are tough questions with no obvious answers.

Sure, after you describe the physical mechanism behind every physical disease.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, anyone?

> but the cost of crime* is invariably far higher than the cost of policing.

Homeland Security

If they coded in C#, sure, I'd try to convince them. But hard to cost justify dropping an existing business codebase that uses a particular language just to pick up a better database access library.

But if you're an up and coming business, this is the way to do it.

I admit it is not a panacea, it has it's own quirks, but 99% of things are flawless. I am picky as can be, but Entity Framework has impressed me.

This is all a giant mix of hogwash and bullshit intended to discredit (amongst only the easily-impressed, low-information scientists of the validity of Doctor Emmett Brown's proven research.

Personally, I expect that many developers will end up creating web apps, and calling it a day because the app will work pretty much anywhere after a few tweaks.

> hey willingly put their heads in the guillotine by adopting YA3GL (C#/.NET) that gives no advantages unless you want to do things the Microsoft way

Gives no advantages? Bullshit. Have you ever worked with the Entity Framework under C#? Way beyond the best way of working with data I've ever encountered. I am able to crank out solid data-intensive code in 1/10 the time it would take me with NHibernate or Java with Hibernate, let alone older attempts at making data a first class citizen in the language. MVC 3 or 4 with Entity Framework 4 or 5 makes you able to crank out stuff in a few weeks that used to take a year with all the boilerplate crapCode you use to have to write. (Assuming you start with a good architecture design)

'It's evolving literally to be a single platform,'

It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!