Liquid Development

Code should be more like language.  Code should speak to people.

After reading some of Brian Marick's stuff I have been wondering if there were other projects on the web working to the same goal.

Guess what?  If you can think it, on the internet you find it :-)

Here is a small review and lots of cut&paste, mainly from comp.lang.ruby..

From "Readability" inflation:

Excerpt I

Similarly, if you're used to:

   f = lambda {|a,b| ... }

then after a while, you might find that so natural that you feel
"ready" for

   f = lambda -> (a,b) { ... }

Well, of course, it allows you to write more uniform code, transforming the block definiton into a tool to define new syntax.

Excerpt II

>    def foo(a =>, b =>, c =>)
>    obj = -> (a, b = 1){ block }

Does

    def foo(a:, b:, c:)

look any better?

Yep, it does.  Much better.
I used to think of named parameters (an Ada idiom, if I am not wrong) as a bureaucratic heritage from dying programming languages.  These days I think they are fundamental to write readable programs.  How else would you know the meaning of a parameter, without chasing words with the mouse to get tooltips to pop up?

Still, I think they should be optional.  There is no point in saying:

plot_point x: x, y: y, color: chosen_color

since this would make perfect sense:

plot_point x, y, chosen_color

Excerpt III

Consider Microsoft's Monad's

   get-childitem | sort-object extension | foreach { $_.filename}

vs Ruby's

   get-childitem.sort_by{|child| child.extension}.map{|child| child.filename}

Msh makes Ruby's 4-time repetition of "child" look quite tedious,
without adding any readability that I can see over the Microsoft version.

Must agree with Microsoft, just this time.  The implicit result variable makes beautiful code possible.


Excerpt IV

How about "contains" or "includes"?

     String contains "abc"
     0..10 contains 5
     1,2,3,4 contains 3
     /^[a-z]*$/ includes "apple"

It would be nice if Array#=== was aliased to Array#include?  So that

     somearray === someval

would check for membership.

Very nice, I'll check if it has been aliased in any ruby library


From Ruby Facets 0.6.2:

Excerpt V

Perhaps it would also be a nice idea to add Enumerable#count,
Kernel#with and Object.new with a template block?

Samples:

[1, 2, 3].count { |item| item > 1 } # => 2
with("foo") { reverse } # "oof"

obj = Object.new("foo") { def reverse() "bar" end }
obj # => "foo"
obj.reverse # => "bar"

This is the way I understood how 'with' would work:

s = "hello"
with(s) {
  reverse!
  capitalize!

}

I like the count, it reminds me of the COUNTIF in Excel.  Actually I would rename it to count_if.
The  'with' is quite cool.  How do they do it?  I wonder how it is implemented.
I like to be able to make context explicit.

Excerpt VI

Thanks for that. Can I humbly suggest that Numeric#ago be changed to
Numeric#before? If we're trying to mimic English, you'd never say "10
days ago yesterday" in English, but you would say "10 days before
yesterday". So instead of making people call

10.days.ago( Time.now - 1.day )

they could call

10.days.before( Time.now - 1.day )

instead. And if Time.yesterday and Time.tomorrow had been defined, you
could simply call

10.days.before Time.yesterday

And maybe this would cause transitional issues, but it might be good to
redefine Numeric#ago to refer to a time relative to the current moment,
which is in line with what it means in English.

yesterday = 1.day.ago
last_monday = 8.days.ago

Similarly, Numeric#later could go the other way:

tomorrow = 1.day.later
next_tuesday = 6.days.later

And Numeric#after could add time to any arbitrary starting point:

three_days_later = 2.days.after Time.tomorrow

very nice, I am impressed.  great readibility.

I'll explore some more examples and possibly some libraries.  I will also try to organize the material that I find in some categories.