Following your message Jeroen, there it also is on Wikitech-l now. -------- Message transféré -------- Sujet : Re: [Wikidata] Imperative programming in Lua, do we really want it? Date : Wed, 6 Dec 2017 23:53:17 +0100 De : Jeroen De Dauw &lt;jeroendedauw(a)gmail.com&gt; Répondre à : Discussion list for the Wikidata project. &lt;wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Pour : Discussion list for the Wikidata project. &lt;wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; 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 |https://keybase.io/jeroendedauw Software craftsmanship advocate | Developer at Wikimedia Germany ~=[,,_,,]:3 On 6 December 2017 at 23:31, John Erling Blad &lt;jeblad(a)gmail.com <mailto:jeblad@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 _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata>

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 &lt;jeblad(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: -- Jan Dittrich UX Design/ User Research Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin Phone: +49 (0)30 219 158 26-0 http://wikimedia.de Imagine a world, in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That‘s our commitment. Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.