Last modified: 2024-09-15 11:51:47
In the olden days people solved problems by knowing techniques. Now we solve problems by buying products. What have we lost? What have we gained? Give examples.
The decline of the physical realm
How everything in the physical world is getting worse. Roads are always closed, restaurants make you piss about with QR codes, bins only collected every 3 weeks, etc.
Grbl:
LinuxCNC:
A series of 8 very-short stories in which the main character disagrees with a decision made by someone else.
We explore every combination of (rude or polite disagreement), (they acquiesced or didn't), (it worked out well or didn't)
It's a story about a series of events involving a hero and a villain, and the twist at the end is that they're the same person. Even better if the hero's events and the villain's events are the same events but viewed from different perspectives (and you only work this out at the end).
Prefer to put configuration near where it is used. Prefer to put utility functions near where they are used. Maybe draw an analogy with cache locality, where a single page of code is your "cache" and accessing information in that same page is way faster than having to look elsewhere, and that's even if you already know where to look.
Obviously you need to make exceptions for things that genuinely need to be configured elsewhere, but if it doesn't need to be configured elsewhere, please just configure it right by where you use it. It makes debugging and understanding the code a lot easier.
Option 1:
sub truncate {
my ($self, $str, %opts) = @_;
my $max_length = $opts{max_length} // $self->max_length // get_optional_config('max_length') // 15;
return substr($str, 0, $max_length);
}
Option 2:
sub truncate {
my ($self, $str) = @_;
my $max_length = 15;
return substr($str, 0, $max_length);
}
In option 1 you have 3 different places to specify max_length (and you just know that $self->max_length is going to look
in more than one place as well...). Trying to divine the actual behaviour of truncate() from this code is very difficult.
In option 2 you know it truncates at 15 characters, no exceptions.
"No exceptions, no exceptions".