Saaien Tist

Saw this webcast a couple of weeks ago where Marcel Molina explains the notion of beautiful code. And I really recommend anyone writing code to have a look at it (totally irrespective of the fact he uses a ruby example...). If you look at the progress bar of the presentation, it looks like it's really long, but only the first half is the actual presentation, followed by a lengthy discussion. (The last few minutes have a nice wrap-up by Chad Fowler.)

The talk is basically split into two parts: (a) what is beauty, and (b) how does that apply to coding?

What is beauty?

After going into the history of what philosophers like Plate, Rousseau and others found beautiful, Molina focusses on the three rules set out by Thomas Aquinas: proportion, integrity and clarity.

One of the main disadvantages of using ruby that I bump into is the absence of named arguments (or keyword parameters). That's no problem for methods taking just two or three arguments, but it does get confusing when you have to be able to pass more than that.

For example, the Bio::Graphics::Panel::Track::Feature#new method takes six arguments: the track it belongs to, a label, a type, the location, an array of subfeatures and a url. (Note: there's only four in the released version.