Witty.ca - Graham's Professional Archives

Yes, I'm an old fuddy-duddy.  I started programming back in the 80's and learned Turbo Pascal and Modula-2.   

I still remember that making code readable was about using helpful names for variables and functions... and ALWAYS make sure those names were visually different so that you wouldn't confuse them.  (e.g.  $user,  $users,  $Users)

Well, welcome to the world of Ruby on Rails.

if Michael Hartl's tutorial is any indication, then this world is chock full of references to things that all look the same.  So far, I've discovered that the following are very VERY different, yet they look so similar.  These are all variables, instances or classes.  (I get so confused!)

user
users
User
@user

micropost
microposts
Micropost
@micropost

And yes, I do find all this hard on my tired old eyes.  While it might "read more like English" I have to wonder at what cost.  I'm sure someday I'll lose hours trying to find a bug that was more about a missing (or extra) "s" than anything else.

If being readable means that my code is hardly debugable, then maybe we've "swung the pendulum" too far!

When I first sat down to learn Rails, I thought, "A week, maybe two... ." 

Yeah, right!

I've now learned that watching a 1hr 20min tutorial video from Michael Hartl will take me about a day.  That's including:

• pausing and rewinding to catch up (typing) and to be sure I understand.
• verifying locally and on Heroku that everything is working right
  (I'm still leary of Heroku, see my previous posts.)
• flipping back-and-forth between the video and the PDF versions (especially where there might be large CSS to copy-and-paste.
• taking regular breaks to shake my head (and make sure that I can remember what I just read/did).

So, I'm learning that patience (with persistence) is my best combination.
... that and keeping a window to StackOverflow.com open for any weirdness that creeps up!