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0 pointsakavi10y ago0 comments

Yes, that's so much worse. At least to my eyes.

It's a death by a thousand cuts. That's 3 dense lines that you need every time you map across a collection.

Which obscures whatever else is happening in the rest of the method/function, so now you've got that much more cognitive load to figure out what it's actual core purpose is.

Which may be subtly modified by the writer purposefully, but you miss it because you assume it's the same "it's just map idiom".

Which may be modified by the writer accidentally, but you miss it because you've trained yourself to parse it as a lump and take its correctness for granted.

0 pointsakavi10y ago0 comments

Yes, that's so much worse. At least to my eyes.

It's a death by a thousand cuts. That's 3 dense lines that you need every time you map across a collection.

Which obscures whatever else is happening in the rest of the method/function, so now you've got that much more cognitive load to figure out what it's actual core purpose is.

Which may be subtly modified by the writer purposefully, but you miss it because you assume it's the same "it's just map idiom".

Which may be modified by the writer accidentally, but you miss it because you've trained yourself to parse it as a lump and take its correctness for granted.

0 comments

4 comments · 1 top-level

NateDad10y ago· 3 in thread

Actually readability at the point of use is very reader-friendly:

    machines := db.GetAllMachines()
    sort.Sort(byName(machines))

For those not familiar with Go, the sort.Sort line is converting the list of machines into a type that matches the interface that sort.Sort expects. The list of machines is sorted in-place

The only part that can be subtly changed is the Less function, which determines the sort order. And as I've said elsewhere... that definition of sort order is something you have to define in any language (for non-trivial types).

akaviOP10y ago

What does the implementation of `byName` look like? I'm not sure I understand what its return type would be.

NateDad10y ago

byName is a type. It's a named type based (likely) on a slice of machines. The byName type implements the functions necessary to support the interface that the sort.Sort function requires:

    type byName []Machine
    
    func (b byName) Len() int { return len(b) }
    func (b byName) Swap(i, j int) { b[j], b[i] = b[i], [b[j] }
    func (b byName) Less(i, j int) { return b[i].Name < b[j].Name }

sort.Sort takes an interface type that has the methods Len, Swap, and Less, as defined in the signatures above, and uses them in a sorting algorithm which sorts the values in-place.

1 more reply

howeman10y ago

Either sort.Interface or a type that implements sort.Interface

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