From: Steve Litt <slitt@...>
Date: 2005-12-08T23:58:17+09:00
Subject: Re: They say I write Ruby like Perl

On Thursday 08 December 2005 09:29 am, Bill Guindon wrote:
> On 12/8/05, Chris Game <chrisgame@example.net> wrote:
> > Ryan Leavengood wrote:
> > > 1. The general naming convention is lowercase with underscores for
> > > variables and methods. You have sort of a mix of
> > > "runitalltogether" variables, i.e. prevsibling, and then the
> > > CamelCase methods like insertSiblingAfterYou. Those should be
> > > prev_sibling and insert_sibling_after_you (though that last one
> > > is a bit too long.)
> >
> > Who says? Just a style/convention issue surely. Readability doesn't
> > suffer, nor does execution.
>
> Personally, I think readability does suffer.  The wordier it gets, the
> more I have to think.  Why not a simple 'append_sibling'?

This is a special case of the Node.pm/Node.py/Node.rb tool. I wanted the 
application programmer (the guy *using* the tool as opposed to the guy 
authoring it (me)) to be able to know exactly what the method does, at a 
glance. I wanted it to be abundently clear that it was appended to the 
current object, and not to something else. For instance, if the programmer 
got a little confused he might think the object was what was being inserted 
(perhaps inserted into the argument???) I was trying to have the code serve 
as documentation.

Looking at it from hindsight, I probably could have called them 
append_sibling() and prepend_sibling(), and figured it would be obvious that 
the argument was what was being inserted, and the object was what the 
argument was being appended or prepended to.

Unfortunately I cannot change this at this point because there's a lot of code 
using Node.pm, and possibly some using Node.py, so I can't change it without 
breaking a lot of programs, and I want to keep the method calls in Node.pm, 
Node.py and Node.rb as similar as possible.

However, the next *independent* software I write, I'll definitely spend some 
time thinking of more succinct ways to create descriptive variable names. 
Yep, in hindsight, insert_sibling_after_you might have been overkill.

Incidentally, if you ever want to really understand a problem domain, one way 
is write it in three different languages, and get feedback in all three :-)

Thanks

SteveT
 
Steve Litt
http://www.troubleshooters.com
slitt@troubleshooters.com