TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

Open source dramas

Just some commentary on some months-old dramas.

A couple months ago there was some drama in the Clojure community. An excellent summary can be found in eccentric_j's top comment on this reddit thread.

The TLDR is that someone got sick of how difficult it was to make contributions to Clojure and ragequit (politely), then Rich made this "it's not about you" post, and then a few days later as if to rub salt in the wounds REBL was released with a non-open-source license.

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Self-documenting code

I read Uncle Bob's Clean Code book last year, and one of its examples in the final summary chapter on the importance of naming stuck with me. I mean, most people will just agree that naming is important, but sometimes convincing is needed, and the examples given are either trivial (i.e there's really not a naming problem) or convoluted (you'd never write code that way to being with, even with good names). Bob's example looked like it was going to be the second kind. Have a look:


public int x() {
int q = 0;
int z = 0;
for (int kk = 0; kk < 10; kk++) {
if (l[z] == 10) {
q += 10 + (l[z+1] + l[z+2]);
z += 1;
} else if (l[z] + l[z+1] == 10) {
q += 10 + l[z+2];
z += 2;
} else {
q += l[z] + l[z+1];
z += 2;
}
}
return q;
}


A loop with a few if-elses in it. A reference to some higher-scoped array l. Some magic numbers. What does it mean? Would anyone ever write this? I can tell you what this code does on the machine, I can't tell you what it "does". Its purpose. Its meaning.

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