If you have so much code on one line that you feel the need for inline
comments, you could, you know, break it up into multiple lines.
my point was about other peoples' code, including much of the stuff
written by those whose thorough style I admire. It's not that there's
too much on the lines. It's just that sometimes it would be nice to
throw an extra word or two in there. Ruby is supposed to read like
English. sometimes it would be totally appropriate to spruce up your
grammar or clarify your nouns by putting comments in between your
variables, methods, hash keys and class names.
I know that adding a crutch can have severe consequences and Matz has
made important compromises that have worked out extremely well. In fact
I think one of the most significant was his work on disambiguation that
allows us to usually forego parentheses. Writing without parens not
only makes the code more readable, it gives you natural clues about when
things are ready to go on to the next line. You basically do one thing
on each line, usually call one method on each line (and then call
methods to provide its arguments). Sometimes the line gets long, but
sometimes that's right for the situation. I feel that the more tools
you can use, the more able you are to find the right one for each
situation. Short lines are a great tool but code shouldn't be penalized
for using long, descriptive names and offering bountiful options, or for
programming functionally and with procs. I know these can all be moved
onto more lines to facilitate comments, and I do this, but how often do
you see the comments there? I tend to feel that if the trade-offs
aren't too big, we could adopt this feature and let some people try it
and others ignore it. I can only guess that it would slow down the
interpreter and therefore is an unlikely addition, but if that's not the
case maybe it's worth a second thought as you read through all the code
you see on github during the next week.
I'm reminded of one day when I suggested that it would be cool to have
highlighting that could alert you when you needed to add parentheses in
order to get the precedence you wanted. Like now, I wasn't looking for
a lecture. I was just admiring Ruby's ability to nudge you in the right
direction, and speculating about how we could maybe make it even
stronger and more accessible.
