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0 pointsuserbinator6y ago0 comments

I can hardly imagine a case where you would misspell "select" and not notice it at some point, nor use it in more than one place (the keyword detector) in the parser.

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7 comments · 3 top-level

Townley6y ago· 2 in thread

The pattern (which I employ only sometimes) is to have almost all literals defined in this way. Perhaps SELECT isn’t likely to be the word you misspell, but I’m a careless typist and make 10 typos a minute. Taking this added step helps your editor save you from yourself.

Having standards like that and keeping them helps a lot. Next time you have a different keyword, you don't have to think "does it deserve a constant?" - all of them do.

Similar to how linters stop you from overthinking indentation in specific cases, or some naming standards, and later rename/reformat-wars.

userbinatorOP6y ago

all of them do.

That's what leads to dogmatic cargo-culting. Good software is written by thinking about the circumstances and doing what makes the most sense, not by mindless rule-following that don't always make sense.

I don't know why someone would be so worried about typos and introduce more verbosity and redundancy in the process; but then again, I don't use an IDE and I've never had this problem.

throwaway8943456y ago· 2 in thread

It’s one of the more common bugs in our office. Before we integrated a Python linter in our CI for a prototype project, we would see several such typo errors each week with a small team (and that was with symbols, not string literals).

userbinatorOP6y ago

Python and a lot of the other dynamic languages are in a slightly different situation.

throwaway8943456y ago

The point is that if you can make typos in identifiers in (unlinted) Python then you can make typos in string literals in Go. In both cases, there is no static analysis to help you.

triyambakam6y ago

You'd be surprised...

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