I'd love a book on statistics for programmers written by Peter Seibel. I know there's Think Stats, and that's a pretty good book, but I'd be interested in a Lisper's take. PCL and Coders at Work are really great.
Funny - when looking at a codebase for the first time, I do almost exactly the same thing as described by Mr Seibel: I start rewriting it. I rename functions or methods that I think have poorly chosen names, I rename the names of fields, variables or parameters for the same reason, I refactor, restructure, and reformat the code to look like I think it should look, and so on.
That sounds like it could be really beneficial to understanding a piece of code, but it seems like it would only ever be really feasible if you were working alone and taking some code from somewhere else and completely consuming it, into a new project like Toot and Whistle or into some other existing project. Most of the times that I've needed to ramp up understanding of some code is either at a new job or before contributing to some existing project.
Would you do this after starting at a new job, and make this your first commit? Or before contributing to open source?
I could envision some awkward social problems arising there. If you kept that code to yourself, but continued working on the old code, that would probably be frustrating.
I'm just curious because I'm really attracted to the idea of this method but am not sure if it would really work where I'd want it to.
Same here. Sometimes I come across code that's not easily improved that way, and not just because it's fragile -- this seems less rare than, say, 15 years ago. Does it seem that way to the rest of you? That things are getting better?
From time to time I imagine a language that lets you write constraints on your code in the language yourself — kind of like macros but instead of extending the syntax your compiler understands, they would allow you to extend the set of things you could say about your code that the compiler would then understand.
[+] [-] spacemanaki|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mahmud|13 years ago|reply
fwiw, creators of R are Lisp weenies, so you might wanna look there more carefully :-)
[+] [-] Graphon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spacemanaki|13 years ago|reply
Would you do this after starting at a new job, and make this your first commit? Or before contributing to open source?
I could envision some awkward social problems arising there. If you kept that code to yourself, but continued working on the old code, that would probably be frustrating.
I'm just curious because I'm really attracted to the idea of this method but am not sure if it would really work where I'd want it to.
[+] [-] abecedarius|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abecedarius|13 years ago|reply
Auditors in E: http://www.erights.org/elang/kernel/auditors/
[+] [-] AutoCorrect|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kinleyd|13 years ago|reply