On 2010-06-16 14:13:22 -0700, Magnus Holm said: > On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 20:45, Rein Henrichs <reinh / reinh.com> wrote: >> _why's code is full of metaprogramming where simpler alternatives exist. >> Case in point: Camping. I wonder if it isn't in part to blame for the >> current Ruby fetish with metaprogramming. That said, I do love me some >> chunky bacon. > > Bad choice of victim (Camping, not _why), because the whole philosophy > of Camping > is to experiment with weird Ruby code: > > No, let's not have rules. I don't feel comfortable with having > coding standards or any protocol on Camping. The point of Camping > is to have very ugly, tricky code that goes against all the rules that > people make for "beautiful" code these days. To show that ugly code > can do beautiful things, maybe. > > I don't want to demonize anyone here, I just want to express the > ideas that make Camping different. Camping's personality is 80x50. > It is like the little gears of a watch that are all meshed together > into a tight little mind-bending machine. The challenge of Camping > isn't to figure out how to automate obfuscation. The challenge is > to bring new tricks into the code that push Ruby's parser and make > everyone look twice. > > Not all code needs to be a factory, some of it can just be origami. > > _why > > > // Magnus Holm Not at all. This is exactly why I chose Camping. It more than adequately demonstrates _why's fetish for "tricky code". Such trickiness is also present in much of his other code, but not even _why can disagree with this example. _why may know tradeoffs imposed by "very ugly, tricky code that goes against all the rules" but the people who look to _why for advice (like his Poignant Guide, aimed directly at Ruby newcomers) are incapable of making this critical distinction. Also, the pronoun may have been ambiguous. I meant "I wonder if *_why's code* isn't in part to blame...", not specifically Camping. -- Rein Henrichs http://puppetlabs.com http://reinh.com