I have no easy solutions either but one observation: Copy paste culture seems to be huge on wiki* and people want to get stuff done quickly. So a common practice is to search for something, tweak it and move on. Inferring from own experience: This style is probably easier with procedural code. I assume that non-professional web development and data analysis code for scientific projects employs similar practices. They also share the same pattern that people very graspably want to get a non-programming thing done: See their website, publish a paper…
A possible improvement could be providing special purpose, domain centered libraries that encapsulate common patterns. Look at bootstrap (CSS//HTML), jquery (JavaScript), dplyr and the like for common data analysis tasks in the R language. With these libraries you can often write a maintanable, terse and as-easy-to-read-as-procedural-for-not-programming-pros style. Jan 2017-12-07 19:24 GMT+00:00 John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>: > There are some really weird modules out there, I'm not sure whether it > makes a good discussion environment to point them out. > > My wild guess is that the modules turn into an imperative style because > the libraries (including Wikibase), returns fragments of large table > structures. To process the fragments you then do iterations where different > subparts of those tables are extracted, keeping a state for whatever you > infer from those calls. This creates a lot of extracted states, and often > the states exists inside calls you can't test. Usually you can't even get > to those calls without breaking the interface *somehow*. > > Perhaps something can be done by writing a few example pages on Mediawiki, > but my experience is that developers at Wikipedia (aka script kiddies like > me) does not check pages at Mediawiki, they just assume they do it > TheRightWay™. Writhing a set of programming manuals can thus easily become > a complete waste of time. > > No, I don't have any easy solutions. > > > > On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:53 PM, Jeroen De Dauw <jeroended...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> Hey, >> >> While I am not up to speed with the Lua surrounding Wikidata or >> MediaWiki, I support the call for avoiding overly imperative code where >> possible. >> >> Most Lua code I have seen in the past (which has nothing to do with >> MediaWiki) was very imperative, procedural and statefull. Those are things >> you want to avoid if you want your code to be maintainable, easy to >> understand and testable. Since Lua supports OO and functional styles, the >> language is not an excuse for throwing well establishes software >> development practices out of the window. >> >> If the code is currently procedural, I would recommend establishing that >> new code should not be procedural and have automawted tests unless there is >> very good reason to make an exception. If some of this code is written by >> people not familiar with software development, it is also important to >> create good examples for them and provide guidance so they do not >> unknowingly copy and adopt poor practices/styles. >> >> John, perhaps you can link the code that caused you to start this thread >> so that there is something more concrete to discuss? >> >> (This is just my personal opinion, not some official statement from >> Wikimedia Deutschland) >> >> PS: I just noticed this is the Wikidata mailing list and not the >> Wikidata-tech one :( >> >> Cheers >> >> -- >> Jeroen De Dauw | https://entropywins.wtf | ht >> tps://keybase.io/jeroendedauw >> Software craftsmanship advocate | Developer at Wikimedia Germany >> ~=[,,_,,]:3 >> >> On 6 December 2017 at 23:31, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> With the current Lua environment we have ended up with an imperative >>> programming style in the modules. That invites to statefull objects, which >>> does not create easilly testable libraries. >>> >>> Do we have some ideas on how to avoid this, or is it simply the way >>> things are in Lua? I would really like functional programming with >>> chainable calls, but other might want something different? >>> >>> John >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Wikidata mailing list >>> Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org >>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata >>> >>> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Wikidata mailing list >> Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > Wikidata mailing list > Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata > > -- Jan Dittrich UX Design/ User Research Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin Phone: +49 (0)30 219 158 26-0 http://wikimedia.de Imagine a world, in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That‘s our commitment. Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
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