The other day, I noticed a flurry of people arguing about whether adding methods like #second, #third, and #fourth to Array is a good idea or not.
I quipped:
Would anyone prefer methods like caddr?
I'd better clear something up. I have never written a method like #fourth for myself, but I am not rabidly opposed to their inclusion in Rails or Ruby either. My opinion on opening core classes is that it is not sustainable in the long run, but at the same time I'm not losing sleep over the idea that upgrading to Edge Rails will break some piece of code where I've defined the method #second as meaning an instance of array seconds the nomination of another model object for speaker of the house.
If it isn't going to break my code, or if people using it isn't going to make their code unreadable... It's hard for me to get worked up about it.
When I asked if people would prefer caddr, I was absolutely not suggesting that #fourth was clearly superior because it's English. Lisp's c(a|d)+r methods are like specialized tools. They are readable to professional Lisp programmers because (a) they are a standard part of the language, and (b) they are more powerful than #fourth because they can reach into any arbitrary nested list and extract a node.
Words become unwieldy when you need a lot of them to get the job done. That's why I don't write "The fourteenth day of the sixth month of the year one thousand, nine hundred, and sixty-two" when people ask me my birth date, and that's why terser tools are important parts of programming. If you had to reach into a nested list, you might find .fourth.last.first.third a little cumbersome.
I think it's perfectly fine to want to write Ruby code that looks like English. And if you aren't writing "The fourteenth day of the sixth month of the year one thousand, nine hundred, and sixty-two" but rather "The fourth item of this list," it's no big whup to me if you prefer #fourth to [3].
So why did I ask the question? I guess I was trying to provoke people into doing something other than arguing about whether David had just moved their cheese. While it's fine to say you like #fourth, I think it's also even better to say "Ok, but what would be really useful is..."
That's all.
p.s. If you press me to give a firm opinion, I choose blue in green :-)
Recent work:
- Kestrels, Quirky Birds, and Hopeless Egocentricity, all of my writing about combinators, collected into one e-book.
- What I've Learned From Failure, my very best essays about getting software from ideas to shipping products, collected into one e-book.
- Katy, a library for writing fluent CoffeeScript and JavaScript using combinators.
- YouAreDaChef, a library for writing method combinations for CoffeeScript and JavaScript projects.
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