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Programmer's Nightmare – Ruby Prank

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Re: Programmer's Nightmare – Ruby Prank

#2

Post by kzar »

Even worse, we actually had a regression at work caused by a zero width space sneaking into some code. Most editors won't even display anything for that character, even the code review tool we used didn't!

In the end I configured Emacs to highlight all unicode characters, trailing whitespace and tabs bright red. I also had it render zero width characters as normal spaces, otherwise they were still invisible. https://github.com/kzar/emacs.d/blob/master/init.el#L181-L19...

Re: Programmer's Nightmare – Ruby Prank

#5

Post by TheDong »

Critique:

1) no LICENSE file

2) not configurable

3) not idiomatic ruby (e.g. camelCase not snake_case)

4) overtly complicated. A better, and shorter version, is:

    bad_whitespace = " "
    ARGF.inplace_mode = ""
    ARGF.each_line do |line|
      print line.gsub(" ", bad_whitespace)
    end
5) bad commenting. The style of commenting each line for what it does is often silly. Something like "fileModified.close # Close file" tells me exactly nothing more than reading the code. Having "noisy" comments makes important comments less obvious, and thus actually makes the overall commenting worse.

This is a sign of a college coder who had some class where the teacher said "you're required to have at least this much commenting", or a beginner programmer.

And finally, this is obviously a dumb toy program.

This isn't useful to show-hn. This isn't anything novel, or even interesting. It's not hard to do. It's poorly implemented and not portable (really, why require the user to edit the filename? ARGF exists for a reason).

This was also submitted by a new hn account mere hours after it was created (clearly by the author). I have no problem with showing off your own work, but at least let it cool down to see if it's a good idea; see that other people think it's interesting or useful in its own right.

I consider presenting an essentially 5-line program that is not generally useable or insightful as being basically spam.

I do recommend keeping on programming and, once you've got a project you're proud of that has seen some use besides yourself, seen at least one other happy user, and relates to HN's interests, post away!

Re: Programmer's Nightmare – Ruby Prank

#6

Post by BraveKenny »

kzar wrote: post #2

Even worse, we actually had a regression at work caused by a zero width space sneaking into some code. Most editors won't even display anything for that character, even the code review tool we used didn't! In the end I configured Emacs to highlight all unicode characters, trailing whitespace and tabs bright red. I also had it render zero width characters as normal spaces, otherwise they were still invisible. https://…

Sounds like some evil plan StackOverflow could use: inserting those characters randomly in the answers' codes to deter copy-pasting.

Re: Programmer's Nightmare – Ruby Prank

#9

Post by volent »

TheDong wrote: post #5

Critique: 1) no LICENSE file 2) not configurable 3) not idiomatic ruby (e.g. camelCase not snake_case) 4) overtly complicated. A better, and shorter version, is: bad_whitespace = " " ARGF.inplace_mode = "" ARGF.each_line do |line| print line.gsub(" ", bad_whitespace) end 5) bad commenting. The style of commenting each line for what it does is often silly. Something like "fileModified.close # Close file" tells me exac…

If he's a beginner your comment might be a bit harsh.

If it's not interesting to you don't upvote the post but saying it's "dumb" and "ARGF exists for a reason" is just being rude.

Re: Programmer's Nightmare – Ruby Prank

#10

Post by kyberias »

TheDong wrote: post #5

Critique: 1) no LICENSE file 2) not configurable 3) not idiomatic ruby (e.g. camelCase not snake_case) 4) overtly complicated. A better, and shorter version, is: bad_whitespace = " " ARGF.inplace_mode = "" ARGF.each_line do |line| print line.gsub(" ", bad_whitespace) end 5) bad commenting. The style of commenting each line for what it does is often silly. Something like "fileModified.close # Close file" tells me exac…

Out of curiosity (haven't done ruby for awhile): is your line-by-line implementation safe? Is it guaranteed that the lines are identical in the output file besides the character you're replacing? I'm thinking different CR+LR combinations. What if the final line is not terminated by newline? Doesn't print always add it?
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