Fine. Though I wonder why you don't think that a new idea that no one has considered before is innovative?

It's obviously not "reusing old ideas", so why do you discount it?

You're right, it was the AC. Still, his information is dramatically out-of-date. Why contradict that obvious fact?

And what about the alleged "severe limitations to hardware access" you mention explicitly?

I thought so.

If apple had invented the touch sensitive keyboard and associated gestures, you'd be singing their prases.

I want to do simple things like switch between tasks. I'm not in the minority here. Lots of people want that feature. Think: "Can I deal with this notification and get back to my game?"

Android, obviously, can't handle that. Most of the time, it just closes the other program when you change tasks. There's no warning, and nothing you can do to stop it. It drives my wife crazy. She was spoiled by her old PlayBook, which could not only handle task-switching, but true multitasking.

Me too, which is why I own a BlackBerry. Android, as you know, still requires constant maintenance. Between the malware and other issues, it's no wonder the most popular non-game apps for Android are maintenance programs.

Speak for yourself.

The more "PC" like my mobile devices get, the happier I am. A Surface Pro is far more in-line with the wants and needs of the average user than is a Kindle Fire or an iPad. I would hope that this would extend in mobile phones as well. They're one of the few companies with an offering that could make me give up my BlackBerry.

The computer in my pocket should be a computer. Android, while popular here, can't even handle simple task-switching.

Your information is astonishingly out-of-date.

No innovation? There's nothing else like them in the market.

Just so you know, when Spock used the word 'logical', he was using it incorrectly. Consequently, you are using it incorrectly as well. Please stop.

Back on topic, so you're saying that a persons religious beliefs affect their ability as a developer.

So .. Do Buddhists write better code than Hindus? Are Raeliens better developers than Shintoists? Why or why not?

So you think a persons religious beliefs affect their ability to program.

That's ridiculous. Even more ridiculous is your "reasoning".

Indeed. By introducing abstractions, you exchange performance and flexibility for simplicity (of one kind or another). More than one unmaintainable mess has been made by abstraction-hungry developers layering one leaky abstraction on top of another in a vein attempt to restore some of that flexibility.

This is why I'm a fan of top-down design. It tends to find the right balance almost automatically.

I'm not sure what that has to do with writing "badly formatted code", but I'd still caution against that. Some of the best advice I ever received: "There are no good writers, only good rewriters." I've found this to be true for code as well. It's amazing how much you can improve your code once you've distanced yourself from it a bit.

That doesn't make sense to me. Why would a persons beliefs about religion (or politics, race, potato chip flavors) have any influence on their ability to write computer programs?

Do you think Buddhists write better code than Hindus? Are Raeliens better developers than Shintoists? What could possibly compel you to put forward such a silly belief?

I'd rather have a readable and maintainable 4500-line function than an unreadable and unmaintainable 45-line function.

I remember, years ago, standard advice to students to break up code in to functions when some process got over some number of lines. Know what we got? A lot of really odd functions of similar length, as they broke things apart at seemingly random boundaries! I'm still deeply suspicious when I hear people talk about a proper length for functions.

It's time to let that one go, and teach students that while shorter is often better, length doesn't really matter that much. They ought to factor out functions when they see them and when it makes the program more readable. I'll suggest this as a new rule-of-thumb: functions should do just one thing and be named accordingly.

(Still, 4500 lines? Damn, that's big.)

"Refactor" implies simplification, not optimization. Given all the disagreement here, maybe we should stop using such an imprecise term and just go with "rewrite".