Re: Coding practices

[David Kastrup]

Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 10:44 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> If you want an example of reasonable documenting and coding practice,
>> take tex.web (it is public domain), run it through weave and pdftex
>> and peruse significant extracts of the resulting PDF.
>
> While tex.web is a beautiful example of literate programming, it was
>
> a. created by one the worlds' foremost computer scientists.

Well, that's like calling St. Paul one of the worlds' foremost popes.
I don't see that as a disqualifying factor.  His Pascal coding is
definitely not more obfuscate than LilyPond on average.

> b. created for a program whose behavior and code was to be set in stone.

A module doing a certain job should be doing that job good enough to be
able to do it in 10 years.  Documenting it is not amiss.

> I think that looking at tex.web will not give anyone practical answers
> on how to structure their lilypond code.

I was talking about "reasonable documenting and coding practice".  That
does not involve how to structure things.  As I said, we are talking
about post-1960s Pascal coding, and he tried his best to still present
things in a structured way, in well-documented meaningful chunks.

Nowadays we have much more modular programming languages, and we make a
mess of it.  I consider doing good work with bad tools a better example
than doing bad work with good tools.

-- 
David Kastrup