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Introduction
Some thoughtful person took their time to respond to a
blog that using anonymous types constitutes laziness. An
anonymous type is a type defined on the fly by using the
“New With” construct, naming the parameters and providing
initializers. In fact, the compiler code generates the class
as an anonymous type when you do this. I submit that this in
fact is not laziness, but a diligent use of time.
Archimedes is attributed with saying “give me a lever
long enough and a place to stand and I will move the world.”
Saying that employing this or that tool–the proverbial
lever if you will–is lazy is short sighted. There is a
certain beauty in toiling long and hard to accomplish an
end, but what constitutes long, hard, or even toil. If you
or I think hard enough about a problem and the result of
that labor is a tool that favors future labor savings have
we not indeed labored long and hard?
Terms like long, hard, and lazy are relative. What is
long to one is short to another. The same is true of hard
and lazy. A calculus problem can seem insurmountable to many
people, but those schooled in calculus may be able to solve
the problem in short order. What about people that don’t do
physical work, but make disproportionately large amounts of
money? Compare entertainers to ditch diggers. Clearly the
ditch digger probably toils in the classical sense of the
word, but practicing an art-craft is clearly labor and may
be hard to the artist.
I encourage you to forget about words like toil, hard,
and lazy as programmers. Focus on finding levers that make
your labor easy. If you are toiling at writing code then you
may just be missing the critical lever. Clearly there are
millions of lines of code in the .NET framework already
written; it is no more lazy to use these lines of code than
it is to expect a better living through a college education.
Look at it another way. If you avoid laborious coding then
your brain and time are free to invent clever new solutions.
Stand proudly on the shoulders of greatness to achieve
inspired genius. If you can write code in fewer lines, solve
problems with simpler means, or rely on existing tools,
idioms, and engines to make your life a little easier and to
get to the heart of a solution faster than you are certainly
not lazy.
Biography
Paul Kimmel is the VB Today columnist for CodeGuru and has written
several books on object-oriented programming and .NET. Check
out his upcoming book Professional DevExpress ASP.NET
Controls (from Wiley) now available on Amazon.com and
fine bookstores everywhere. Look for his upcoming book
Teach Yourself the ADO.NET Entity Framework in 24
Hours (from Sams). You may contact him for technology
questions at pkimmel@softconcepts
.com. Paul Kimmel is a Technical Evangelist for
Developer Express, Inc, and you can ask him about Developer
Express at paulk@devexpress.com
and read his DX blog at http://
community.devexpress.com/blogs/paulk.
