Event-driven Programming - Criticism and Best Practice

Criticism and Best Practice

Event-driven programming is widely used in graphical user interfaces because it has been adopted by most commercial widget toolkits as the model for interaction. The design of those toolkits has been criticized for promoting an over-simplified model of event-action, leading programmers to create error prone, difficult to extend and excessively complex application code:

Such an approach is fertile ground for bugs for at least two reasons:

  1. It can lead to writing code within the event handler for each possible value of various values in the program, making the source code hard to understand.
  2. In places where the event code changes variables shared throughout the program, it can require the programmer to write convoluted algorithms to avoid unwanted ripple effects.

Read more about this topic:  Event-driven Programming

Famous quotes containing the words criticism and, criticism and/or practice:

    A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.”
    Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)

    The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.
    Camille Paglia (b. 1947)

    The astonishment of life, is, the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)