Why do we need modules at all? (2011)
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Why do we need modules at all? (2011)
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Re: Why do we need modules at all? (2011)
#2That would be too useful. Imagine adding tags to functions and generally treat them as "items" which you can multi-categorize, search through, select, etc like with any dataset. Way too advanced.
Re: Why do we need modules at all? (2011)
#3We need modules so that my search results aren't cluttered with contamination from code that is optimised to be found rather than designed to solve my specific problem.
We need then so that we can find all functions that are core to a given purpose, and have been written with consideration of their performance and a unified purpose rather than also finding a grab bag of everybody's crappy utilities that weren't designed to scale for my use case.
We need them so that people don't have to have 80 character long function names prefixed with Hungarian notation for every distinct domain that shares the same words with different meanings.
Re: Why do we need modules at all? (2011)
#4Meta: this needs "(2011)" in the title, please.
Re: Why do we need modules at all? (2011)
#5That would be too useful. Imagine adding tags to functions and generally treat them as "items" which you can multi-categorize, search through, select, etc like with any dataset. Way too advanced.
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Re: Why do we need modules at all? (2011)
#6[deleted]
Re: Why do we need modules at all? (2011)
#7We need modules so that my search results aren't cluttered with contamination from code that is optimised to be found rather than designed to solve my specific problem. We need then so that we can find all functions that are core to a given purpose, and have been written with consideration of their performance and a unified purpose rather than also finding a grab bag of everybody's crappy utilities that weren't desig…
I feel like you are arguing more for namespaces than modules.
Having a hierarchical naming system that spans everything makes it largely irrelevant how the functions themselves are physically organized. This also provides a pattern for disambiguating similar products by way of prefixing the real world FQDNs of each enterprise.
Re: Why do we need modules at all? (2011)
#8If there are no modules but a "flat" global namespace which requires every function name to be unique to avoid collisions... it means people would inevitably re-invent pseudo/fake "modules" and hierarchy in metadata tags in large non-trivial codebases.
Consider a function name: log()
Is it a function to log an event for audit history?
Or is it a function to get the mathematical natural logarithm of a number?
The global namespace forces the functions to be named differently (maybe use underscore '_') in "audit_log()" and the other "math_log()". With modules, the names would isolated be colons "::" or a period '.' : Audit.log() and Math.log(). Audit and Math are isolated namespaces. You still have potential global namespace collisions but it happens at the higher level of module names instead of the leaf function names. Coordinating the naming at the level of modules to avoid conflicts is much less frequent and more manageable.
Same issue in os file systems with proposing no folders/directories and only a flat global namespace with metadata tags. The filenames themselves would have embedded substrings with underscores to recreate fake folder names. People would reinvent hierarchy in tag names with concatenated substrings like "tag:docs_taxes_archive" to recreate pseudo folders/directories of "/docs/taxes/archive". Yes, some users could deliberately avoid hiearchies and only name tags as 1-level such as "docs", "taxes", "archive" ... but that creates new organizational problems because some have "work docs" vs "personal docs" ... which gravitates towards a hierarchical organization again.
Re: Why do we need modules at all? (2011)
#9Should have put on the (2011) label
Re: Why do we need modules at all? (2011)
#10We need modules because they demarcate social units of collaboration.