Maurício wrote:
> > We have one: urchin.earth.li/~ian/style/haskell.html
>
> Yes, it's good. We should publicise it more.
Just a tought: I would like to see a guide talking about the
code itself, not about the presentation. Maybe this is ignored
because it's difficult. It's easy to get bad code and make sure
it follows strict layout, doesn't resemble imperative code and
has comments on all functions. It's still bad code.
You've nailed it: "this is ignored because it's difficult." It's nothing
special about Haskell, it holds for style guides for every language I've
seen.
It's difficult because it's not a question of science, but rather a
question of aesthetics. And as anyone in the humanities can tell you,
when it comes to aesthetics people disagree. But the reason they
disagree is because of this fundamental truth: there's no right answer.
There are many wrong answers, to be sure, but there's no right answer.
To put a finer point on it, not everyone likes the same authors. One
person's clear discussion is another's pedantry or another's logorrhea.
Consider style guides for writing prose. Many of these are full of
discussion about where to place commas, or when to use a different word
because of the possibility for confusion, or when to reorder the parts
of a sentence. What few of them ever discuss are things like how to
structure an argument, how to introduce characters, when a character
should be removed, what makes for an interesting plot, etc. Even those
that discuss such things are typically vague about it and often make
appeals to intuitions and aesthetics they presuppose.
Good writers and good coders will learn these things over time but they
learn them by practice just like any artisan. Good style guides are like
a good instructor: they can teach you how to use a chisel, but they
can't teach you how to carve. Over time, with enough experience after
carving many different things, the good sculptor will come to an
intuitive understanding about what things will work and what things are
likely to be problematic. They can pass down the lessons, the horror
stories, a codification of their hunches, but what they can't teach is
the intuition itself.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see more guides that take on these sorts
of issues. This is why they're so rare, is all.
My job over the last year has been trying to teach a group of colleagues
---in person--- about what makes good style. In addition to the issues
mentioned above, there's another one that looms large. Most people
already have a style ---good, bad, indifferent--- and they often
perceive any attempts to change that style as (at best) a frivolity or
(at worst) an attack on their abilities. Books and webpages can
circumvent this to an extent (thanks to the selection bias of who would
be reading them anyways), but any guide that is too challenging will be
thrown out, no matter how right it is. Thus it takes someone who's a
good writer, speaker, or manager and not just someone who's a good
coder. Because the author needs to convey not only the intuition, but
also enough of themselves that the reader will accept their experience
and listen to what they have to say.
(And folks who are good with both personal and technical arenas can earn
a lot more elsewhere than writing guides, so they'd have to be
charitable and generous as well ;)
--
Live well,
~wren
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