On Jul 3, 2011, at 3:13 AM, Sean Corfield wrote: > Since I mostly work with 50-100kloc projects, I think 5-10kloc > projects are kinda small :)
My point was that I'm running into interesting questions even with a small program. The answers are not obvious to me. There's evidence I'm not alone, so those to whom the answers *are* obvious would help the community by describing them. * An example: organizing code into namespaces (skippable) I was uncertain that Midje's "sweet" (syntactically sugared) interface would catch on, so I organized it by translation layers. I wrote the "unprocessed" layer first; it had functions that worked solely on maps. The "semi-sweet" layer provided macros that introduced some useful conventions but had only one syntactic innovation. It was easy to translate the `expect` and `fake` macros into "unprocessed" function calls on maps. Then I added the "sweet" layer that has a considerably more ambitious set of macros that translate `facts` into `expects` and `fakes`. As time went on, I pulled out utility functions into namespaces like [midje.util thread-safe-var-nesting laziness file-position]. But that organization failed. When I divide things up into files, I want the division such that I usually find things in the first place I look. That wasn't happening. So I started migrating to an organization based on verbs (this is a functional language, right?). So I have namespaces like [midje.midje-forms recognizing translating building]. Two problems: 1) New features require recognizing, translating, and building, so all the hopping around files was annoying. 2) The functions didn't fall into such clear-cut categories that I could reliably find things in the first place I look. (Unsurprising, since clear-cut categories are rare in nature: http://www.exampler.com/testing-com/writings/pnsqc-2005-communication.pdf) Now I'm moving toward an organization around nouns, which feels a bit too OO to me, but at least I'm far enough in the project that the key concepts/nouns are likely to stay stable. This progression feels a lot more wasteful than it would have been in Java (which has IDE support) or Ruby (which lets you mention a file once and have it be available throughout the program). So I'd have preferred to get it (more) right in the first place. * What would help It'd be useful for people happy with their multi-namespace codebases to volunteer them as exemplars. What's grouped together and why? What are the dependencies? How'd you arrive at this structure? A really interesting thing to do would be to implement a feature and narrate how you decide where to put things, where existing things must be, and so forth. [I spend a fair amount of time parachuting into projects and learning the code structure by pairing. Works pretty nicely.] ----- Brian Marick, Artisanal Labrador Contract programming in Ruby and Clojure Occasional consulting on Agile www.exampler.com, www.twitter.com/marick -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
