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Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

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Re: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

#261

Post by wruza »

bluedino wrote: post #155
nickelcitymario wrote: post #129

I'd consider myself a writer more than a developer, but I've been working in Rails for over 15 years, and one of my absolute favourite things is "unless". Why? Because it allows you to express yourself more elegantly. The click-bait title is misleading. It's meant to ridicule "unless", but actually achieves the opposite. If you were to write the title of the post as code, it would be: unless !ruby_dev read article en…

unless is one of those things I have to read 2-3 times and it totally bogs me down.

Just reread until you get it.

Re: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

#262

Post by mjevans »

hosh wrote: post #260
nickelcitymario wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! I wouldn't want to argue against your experience. I do wonder if it's an issue of "unless" being misused? Programmers using it just for fun rather than considering whether it's the best choice in context?

In Ruby (and Crystal), I tend to use `unless` for guards at the top of the method, or returns. These are typically `return foo unless baz`. When I write Elixir, `unless` gets awkward in a functional style of programming, and Elixir has guard clauses and pattern matching. I pretty much never use `unless` in Elixir despite using it in Ruby for years. Sometimes, I'll add extra methods with a negation in the name itself.…

Perl also had that delayed syntax check style as an option and I HATED IT.

THING if logical condition

Filter First is far better self-documentation: if condition THING

Re: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

#263

Post by hosh »

mjevans wrote: post #262
hosh wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Ruby (and Crystal), I tend to use `unless` for guards at the top of the method, or returns. These are typically `return foo unless baz`. When I write Elixir, `unless` gets awkward in a functional style of programming, and Elixir has guard clauses and pattern matching. I pretty much never use `unless` in Elixir despite using it in Ruby for years. Sometimes, I'll add extra methods with a negation in the name itself.…

Perl also had that delayed syntax check style as an option and I HATED IT. THING if logical condition Filter First is far better self-documentation: if condition THING

That's a matter of what fits better with the structure of how you think internally, and not necessarily that there is an objectively better way for self-documentation.

For example, I can totally see how imperative-first would mess up people with neurodivergant brains.

Tangent -- Ruby takes a lot of inspiration from Perl.

Re: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

#264

Post by nine_k »

shakow wrote: post #204
nine_k wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The `for` is a very ergonomic syntax to mapping a computation to every element of a sequence. The `while` does a really different thing, it's not about sequences at all, but about checking some bit of mutable state repeatedly.

> The `for` is a very ergonomic syntax to mapping a computation to every element of a sequence. The very ergonomic solution to map a computation to every element of a sequence is `map`. In this case, `for` is filled with bookkeeping that does not matter.

I edited out "syntax sugar" that was in the post initially.

Also, the `for` operator definitely predates the `map` function. Some people also prefer `map` to be more or less pure and expect it to return a usable list; `for ` has no such expectation, it e.g. may consist solely in printing elements.

Re: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

#265

Post by beeforpork »

How about 'ifnot'?

Although I like 'unless' in Ruby, Perl, CommonLisp (sometimes a condition is just naturally the other way of how 'if' wants it), I acknowledge that people get emotional and really hate it. Maybe a better alternative would be 'ifnot' to avoid the ! operator and the parentheses.

Re: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

#266

Post by marcosdumay »

dlkf wrote: post #240
nickelcitymario wrote: post #129

I'd consider myself a writer more than a developer, but I've been working in Rails for over 15 years, and one of my absolute favourite things is "unless". Why? Because it allows you to express yourself more elegantly. The click-bait title is misleading. It's meant to ridicule "unless", but actually achieves the opposite. If you were to write the title of the post as code, it would be: unless !ruby_dev read article en…

There’s a cost-benefit analysis here that you are refusing to do: Of the two variants you’ve posted, the first will click immediately with a generalist dev who doesn’t know Ruby. The second will have them reasoning out loud, and then reaching for the docs to double check that their common-sense intuitions are correct. This is not a contrived example. I regularly find myself having to read some code in a language in w…

Personally, I don't think "readable by people that don't know the language" is a reasonable feature to optimize a language around.

And if you go on that direction, almost the everything on the language is a larger roadblock than an oddly placed conditional.

Re: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

#267

Post by geuis »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #129

I'd consider myself a writer more than a developer, but I've been working in Rails for over 15 years, and one of my absolute favourite things is "unless". Why? Because it allows you to express yourself more elegantly. The click-bait title is misleading. It's meant to ridicule "unless", but actually achieves the opposite. If you were to write the title of the post as code, it would be: unless !ruby_dev read article en…

Nope. It's needless confusion. We're programmers who have stuff to do, and syntactic stuff like unless are not helpful.

if (true) and if not(true) is simple and elegant, and doesn't require any person on my team to stop their flow to puzzle out what the code is supposed to be doing at that point.

Re: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

#269

Post by vidarh »

eloisius wrote: post #193
jewel wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Ruby though, where Array has "size", "length", and "count", all of which are equivalent. The programmer chooses which one they prefer based on the context or their style or the phase of the moon. Ruby inherits the Perl philosophy of "There's more than one way to do it". Compare with Python, and its "There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it." It's true that it makes the compiler less e…

Not exactly the same. It's been a while, but if I recall, count takes a predicate block so you can do things like `numbers.count { |n| n.even? }`

It can also take an argument and will then return the count of the number of items which compares equal to the argument.

"count" is only equivalent to "length" and "size" when called with no argument and no block, and should be slower for that case (it includes a comparison of arity and a call to rb_block_given_p() in MRI before it returns the array length).

Re: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

#270

Post by dlkf »

marcosdumay wrote: post #266
dlkf wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a cost-benefit analysis here that you are refusing to do: Of the two variants you’ve posted, the first will click immediately with a generalist dev who doesn’t know Ruby. The second will have them reasoning out loud, and then reaching for the docs to double check that their common-sense intuitions are correct. This is not a contrived example. I regularly find myself having to read some code in a language in w…

Personally, I don't think "readable by people that don't know the language" is a reasonable feature to optimize a language around. And if you go on that direction, almost the everything on the language is a larger roadblock than an oddly placed conditional.

I never suggested we ”optimize the language around this feature.” I only suggested that it is a higher virtue than some user on HN’s subjective concept of ”elegance.”

What do you think is more important: the speed at which C programmers can navigate your code base, or one person’s subjective idea of ”elegance”?

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