you registered a domain for this - a couple lines of code?
Hah, gratuitous negativity, doesn't it make the world a better place?? :D
Letters: A tiny debugging library for Ruby
11–20 of 27 posts
Re: Letters: A tiny debugging library for Ruby
#12It looks interesting, but the screencast needs to be a bit more concise, and aimed at people who would actually use this. I made it through the first 5 minutes and gave up, because I wanted to see what the library did. I didn't want a tutorial seemingly aimed at absolute beginners, who in my mind wouldn't give two hoots about improved debugging at that stage.
Had there been a shorter overview of the cool things you could do, I might have got a better impression.
Re: Letters: A tiny debugging library for Ruby
#13It looks interesting, but the screencast needs to be a bit more concise, and aimed at people who would actually use this. I made it through the first 5 minutes and gave up, because I wanted to see what the library did. I didn't want a tutorial seemingly aimed at absolute beginners, who in my mind wouldn't give two hoots about improved debugging at that stage. Had there been a shorter overview of the cool things you c…
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Re: Letters: A tiny debugging library for Ruby
#14Re: Letters: A tiny debugging library for Ruby
#15you registered a domain for this - a couple lines of code?
You spent 30 seconds of your life for this - a pointless comment?
worthless postings should be pointed out, i believe, so that we can have quality links on the front page. this sugar coating which seems to be so popular with the hacker news community these days is not helping anyone.
Re: Letters: A tiny debugging library for Ruby
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
You spent 30 seconds of your life for this - a pointless comment?
worthless postings should be pointed out, i believe, so that we can have quality links on the front page. this sugar coating which seems to be so popular with the hacker news community these days is not helping anyone.
What an obnoxious tosspot you are. Once your karma is in minus territory I'm not sure you are qualified to comment on the HN community.
Re: Letters: A tiny debugging library for Ruby
#17This is great. It's sad to say but there are coders (like me) who will write our own half-assed muck in order to half-assedly follow good procedure...or even worse, just skip procedure all together. So any well-implemented, graceful simplication can be more valuable than the library and its seemingly few lines of code at face value. Thank you for putting this together and I hope you keep improving it
Re: Letters: A tiny debugging library for Ruby
#18What am I missing? I looked over the API and tried to skim through the video (10 minutes in and still no demonstration of anything in the API), but I couldn't figure out why any of the Letters functions would be preferable to just jumping into a debugger session.
Anyone care to explain?
Re: Letters: A tiny debugging library for Ruby
#19What am I missing? I looked over the API and tried to skim through the video (10 minutes in and still no demonstration of anything in the API), but I couldn't figure out why any of the Letters functions would be preferable to just jumping into a debugger session. Anyone care to explain?
Letters is an abstraction layer over the ways many people detect problems with code in the real world. (I see these patterns re-emerge every day.) A debugger is part of the solution. Easy profiling and object diffing are another. Detecting how vulnerable you are to XSS attacks is yet another. When you have the power to do this inline without breaking your code apart, I think you gain productivity.
In other words, these patterns are not something we should have to spend brainpower on.
I probably should not have put the screencast on the front page -- it's actually about rationale and not about code examples. You can find concrete examples at http://lettersrb.com/api
Re: Letters: A tiny debugging library for Ruby
#20Didn't check the code out but it looks like p is something like: obj.tap { |x| puts x }
That's the base case. It takes arguments, too, and if you give it a block, it prints out the result of the block called in the receiver's scope.
Why `p` though? That's a method on Kernel already and does puts(args.inspect)