Lua is used for many purposes - some of which I think are well suited to an imperaive approach (or at least would be totally fine to do in an imperative style). There are of course many cases where an imperative approach would be a poor choice.
There are no rules that apply to all programming things equally - context of the programming task matters. -- bawolff On Thursday, December 7, 2017, mathieu stumpf guntz < psychosl...@culture-libre.org> wrote: > Following your message Jeroen, there it also is on Wikitech-l now. > > -------- Message transféré -------- > Sujet : Re: [Wikidata] Imperative programming in Lua, do we really want it? > Date : Wed, 6 Dec 2017 23:53:17 +0100 > De : Jeroen De Dauw <jeroended...@gmail.com> > Répondre à : Discussion list for the Wikidata project. < wikid...@lists.wikimedia.org> > Pour : Discussion list for the Wikidata project. < wikid...@lists.wikimedia.org> > > > > 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 |https://keybase.io/jeroendedauw > Software craftsmanship advocate | Developer at Wikimedia Germany > ~=[,,_,,]:3 > > On 6 December 2017 at 23:31, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com <mailto: 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 > wikid...@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wikid...@lists.wikimedia.org> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata > <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata> > > > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
