Listen to the Voice! 4
You know that voice at the back of your head that says things like “That’s not really a data structure, that’s an object that is!”?
You should listen to it.
I’ve been battling away with having a million and one things monkeying with a result set that consists of an array of arrays, when really it should have been a ResultSet which has a collection of ResultSet::Rows. Once I bit that bullet, I got to do things like add ActiveRecord::Errors to each row and generally start to bring a bunch of big guns to bear on a problem.
So, having listened to the voice at last I’m going through and removing code with gay abandon. Sometimes I think removing code is one of the great joys of being a programmer – it’s the code’s way of telling you you got something right.
So, today’s slogan is “Reify early and reify often”.
Ho yus.
Just had one of those moments myself, realising that a disparate collection of divs, form controls, CSS, javascript and XMLhttp calls is actually a Filterable object, and ended up discarding over half the code previously involved.
It’s a nice feeling :)
Well, it is once you’ve got past the “Oh, I’m a bloody idiot for not doing this earlier” part.
Oh, I’m so used to that feeling, I don’t even notice it most of the time :)
Refactoring is fun, though.
Ahhh, reify, one of my favourite words. Thankyou for using it!