Lets make it clear (the ironic portion seems to obfuscate my email). I did not criticIzed his work and if you ask me, yes his work is stellar.
I fully agreed with him that maintenance is often a less than funny task. Inconsistency in code when maintaining code however is more the norm than the exception even within a single organization. Tension between day to day maintenance pain versus all the other constraints will not disappear tomorrow. Code ages. It takes around 5 years to reach maturity. Afterward you need to prevent decay. This it what I can say after going through so many software projects. I tried to put things in perspective. Real-life constraints exist for business driven projects and open source projects. It seems that you are not interested at all by these. Fine. That's your call. Now if you think that because I did not contribute to patches in Clojure core makes my conclusions about maintenance work unworthy you are erring. And this a very soft statement from my part :) The ironic section was partly about my inadequate skills and you fell happily into this trap. If you really want to discuss my professional achievements send me a private email. This is not the place to discuss this and is orthogonal to the point brought up by Nicola. Which is absolutely valid but hard to solve in a satisfactory way given the constraints. Clojure in Clojure on the JVM and CLR will ease up this... Eventually when some time will have passed. Sent from my iPhone > On Jul 20, 2015, at 10:08, Colin Fleming <colin.mailingl...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Leaving aside your usual "humour", you are once again setting up a total > strawman. Nicola did not say that maintenance should be as much fun as > writing new code, nor did he propose rewriting anything. He made a very > specific claim - that contributing to the Clojure codebase is much less > pleasant than it could be, not because the indentation style is unusual but > because it is inconsistent. > > Since he has a long history of writing very high quality patches for Clojure > whereas you, as far as I can tell, have never written any, means that his > opinion holds a lot more weight in this discussion, for me at least. > >> On 20 July 2015 at 14:45, Luc Prefontaine <lprefonta...@softaddicts.ca> >> wrote: >> >> --- advanced warning: the following section contains a lethal form of irony, >> please skip it if your health condition does not tolerate irony --- >> >> Sure and I never maintained code written by others in 30 years... Never >> wrote patches, never had to comply with odd indentation habits. >> I am an absolute newbie on that subject. >> >> I always write new code and leave maintenance to other less fortunate people. >> >> --- end of ironic section --- >> >> I agree with you. Totally. >> >> Maintenance has never been funnier than new dev and will never be. >> >> Day to day maintenance specifically is a pain in the ass. >> >> Preemptive rewrites as part of maintenance is doable when the code reaches >> an unbearable state >> but someone in charge has to call the shots. >> >> I had numerous discussions about rewriting in the last few decades and yes >> patch consistency is always brought forward. >> >> The driving factors around a decision like this are: the life expectancy of >> the code vs it's complexity vs maintenance cost and agility vs risks >> involved in a rewrite vs budget vs accumulated knowledge. >> >> The maintainer's pain is not the only factor taken into account and often >> not the most important. >> >> That's the harsh reality of life. >> >> Ideally we would always write new stuff and trash code every 2/3 years to >> keep our mood at its peak. >> >> Life is not like that. Sorry :) >> >> Sent from my iPhone >> >> > On Jul 20, 2015, at 08:14, Nicola Mometto <brobro...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > >> > I take it you have never worked on a patch for clojure. >> > I have, and I can tell you that it's not the indentation style the >> > issue -- everybody likes his own and it's definitely in the >> > maintainer's rights to chose what indentation style should be used and >> > for contributors to adapt, I don't have a problem with that. >> > I have a problem with the fact that the indentation style is not >> > consistent even between lines of the same method, tabs and spaces are >> > mixed everywhere -- for every non trivial patch I submit I have to >> > spend non trivial amounts of time to reindent my code using spaces or >> > tabs where appropriate to be consistent with the surrounding code and >> > making sure I don't accidentally commit whitespace changes in my >> > patches. >> > It's certainly not the biggest issue (not even close to it) in the >> > contributing process, but it definitely is an issue and it doesn't >> > help making the overall contributing experience a pleasant one, or one >> > would want to repeat. >> > >> > And the claim that no indentation fix can happen to avoid breaking >> > existing patches in jira is frankly laughable. With the amount of time >> > that usually passes between the writing of a patch and its application >> > to the code base, a lot of them already need to be rebased/rewritten >> > to apply cleanly, often multiple times. >> > >> > On Sat, Jul 18, 2015 at 5:44 PM, Luc Prefontaine >> > <lprefonta...@softaddicts.ca> wrote: >> >> Sure, indentation is what gets the code running on metal :)) >> >> >> >> Not ranting here, just my abs dying from the pain as I laugh :)) >> > >> > -- >> > 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 >> > --- >> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> > "Clojure" group. >> > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> > email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> >> -- >> 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 >> --- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Clojure" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > -- > 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 > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Clojure" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. 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