Die, You Gravy Sucking Pig Dog

With regard to:

sqlConnection.Close(); sqlConnection.Dispose(); sqlConnection = null;

The irony is that the .NET Framework and it's compilers are very good at optimisation and will almost certainly make the object available for garbage collection at the first opportunity - with a good chance that the second two statements would not even make it into the assembly.

> "In the C programming language, you're regularly forced to deal with the painful, dangerous concepts of pointers and explicit memory allocation. "

> "I'd wager the majority of programmers alive today have never once worried about malloc(). I call this progress..."

Anger. Must... resist... anger.

I've come to believe that Jeff Atwood is on a personal mission sent by God himself to piss me off.

Just remember, Jeff: every time you fire up that pretty C# code of yours, and make all your little variables through your ORM, letting the garbage collector clean up the mess you've made and then proceed to pump out those cute little web pages through your cute little templating language, to be sent off to some other computer through some magic wire to some magic browser to be rendered... that thousands and thousands of programmers (who, it should be noted, are almost all still alive, today) worrying about "dangerous" and "painful" concepts like pointers have slaved to make your silly little ORM, your database, your templating language, your network stack, your web browser, your web server, and your operating system.

As I've said before, some of us are in the trenches worrying about all the "dangerous" stuff, like pointers. The primary difference between you and I, though, is that I actually know you exist. I don't believe that at some point in the mid 80's, a network stack and a file system (each created in the "before time") really really loved each other and out popped a web server.

I know its somewhat trendy to pick on Jeff Atwood, but I don't really know what you're getting angry about.

He never said that malloc and free are irrelevant. And manual memory management is dangerous and painful. Anyone who's written a modicum of C would agree with that.

That a majority of programmers today don't have to worry about it is, in fact, progress.

Okay! Okay!

It's killing me.

"Gravy Sucking" should be "Gravy-Sucking"

There.

I feel better now.

This is perhaps one of the most astonishingly vacuous article I have ever read in my entire life. What was is about, exactly? A funny function name? Not to mention that 70% of it is quotes from other people. Pure link bait.