Re: Static typing ain't so bad, after all...

On 22/08/06, Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality
<ihatespam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I was debugging someone else's code the other day (it was htmltools,
actually) and I was in the middle of some function trying to figure out
what it does. That's when I noticed that I had no clue what the passed in
parameter was. I mean, I can see how it was used but it really didn't
reveal what it was. In fact, it could have been anything. I could have
tried to do a search to see when this method was called and try to
investigate what was passed in at each instance but that would not
necessarily be revealing since the object may not have been created in
those methods and, instead, passed into them.
The problem is that dynamic typing, while very powerful, also hid the
intent of the method. Obviously, any object that satisfied whatever the
method was trying to do will suffice as a parameter, and that would be the
point of duck typing, there was obviously some concrete example of some
type the method was expecting. It would really have helped to let me know
what that was...
Now, the answer to this is simply better documentation. Write a damn
comment that says what the method is expecting and, hell, while you're at
it, you could mention what the method does, too. However and
unfortunately, I've been a professional programmer way too long to expect
code to come with good documentation. Out here, in the real world, you're
lucky if the code works...
Has anyone noticed this? How do you deal with this issue?
Thank you...






In my experience the way to handle this is to have parameters and
variables with logical, consistent names. If I'm debugging a function
'foo(i)' it's almost impossible to know what is. If the function
instead was defined as 'foo(categoryName)' it's a lot easier to deduct
that it's a (string or an object that should be able to ducktyped to a
string).

Farrel

.

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