I have no easy solutions either but one observation:
Copy paste culture seems to be huge on wiki* and people want to get stuff
done quickly. So a common practice is to search for something, tweak it and
move on.
Inferring from own experience: This style is probably easier with
procedural code.
I assume that non-professional web development and data analysis code for
scientific projects employs similar practices. They also share the same
pattern that people very graspably want to get a non-programming thing
done: See their website, publish a paper…
A possible improvement could be providing special purpose, domain centered
libraries that encapsulate common patterns. Look at bootstrap (CSS//HTML),
jquery (JavaScript), dplyr and the like for common data analysis tasks in
the R language. With these libraries you can often write a maintanable,
terse and as-easy-to-read-as-procedural-for-not-programming-pros style.
Jan
2017-12-07 19:24 GMT+00:00 John Erling Blad <jeblad(a)gmail.com>om>:
There are some really weird modules out there, I'm
not sure whether it
makes a good discussion environment to point them out.
My wild guess is that the modules turn into an imperative style because
the libraries (including Wikibase), returns fragments of large table
structures. To process the fragments you then do iterations where different
subparts of those tables are extracted, keeping a state for whatever you
infer from those calls. This creates a lot of extracted states, and often
the states exists inside calls you can't test. Usually you can't even get
to those calls without breaking the interface *somehow*.
Perhaps something can be done by writing a few example pages on Mediawiki,
but my experience is that developers at Wikipedia (aka script kiddies like
me) does not check pages at Mediawiki, they just assume they do it
TheRightWay™. Writhing a set of programming manuals can thus easily become
a complete waste of time.
No, I don't have any easy solutions.
On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:53 PM, Jeroen De Dauw <jeroendedauw(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hey,
While I am not up to speed with the Lua surrounding Wikidata or
MediaWiki, I support the call for avoiding overly imperative code where
possible.
Most Lua code I have seen in the past (which has nothing to do with
MediaWiki) was very imperative, procedural and statefull. Those are things
you want to avoid if you want your code to be maintainable, easy to
understand and testable. Since Lua supports OO and functional styles, the
language is not an excuse for throwing well establishes software
development practices out of the window.
If the code is currently procedural, I would recommend establishing that
new code should not be procedural and have automawted tests unless there is
very good reason to make an exception. If some of this code is written by
people not familiar with software development, it is also important to
create good examples for them and provide guidance so they do not
unknowingly copy and adopt poor practices/styles.
John, perhaps you can link the code that caused you to start this thread
so that there is something more concrete to discuss?
(This is just my personal opinion, not some official statement from
Wikimedia Deutschland)
PS: I just noticed this is the Wikidata mailing list and not the
Wikidata-tech one :(
Cheers
--
Jeroen De Dauw |
https://entropywins.wtf | ht
tps://keybase.io/jeroendedauw
Software craftsmanship advocate | Developer at Wikimedia Germany
~=[,,_,,]:3
On 6 December 2017 at 23:31, John Erling Blad <jeblad(a)gmail.com> wrote:
With the current Lua environment we have ended up
with an imperative
programming style in the modules. That invites to statefull objects, which
does not create easilly testable libraries.
Do we have some ideas on how to avoid this, or is it simply the way
things are in Lua? I would really like functional programming with
chainable calls, but other might want something different?
John
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