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/or practice:

    “...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
    —Mary Pickford (1893–1979)

    “Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light; for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop.”
    —Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)