Foo, Bar, and Baz: Not Having It

Posted on April 21, 2012 These placeholder variables are the worst thing to happen to language documentation in the modern era. And so there’ll be none of this on Lingua Pragma. I’ll illustrate the problem by demonstrating classes in ruby. Compare:

Example 1

class Dog def speak return 'woof' end end

class Dachshund < Dog end

fido = Dachshund.new fido.speak => 'woof' Example 2

class Foo def bar return 123 end end

class Baz < Foo end

qux = Baz.new qux.bar => 123 Which example conveys more information? Which is easier to quickly grasp? Which would you rather read?

The dog motif in Example 1 came to me because my GF asked me to write an app to simulate a pet salon. And I’d model the classes something like this.

Google cache for the rescue: http://google.com/search?q=cache%3Alinguapragma.com/blog/201...

(alternate link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sugexp=chrome,m...)

These placeholder variables are the worst thing to happen to language documentation in the modern era. And so there’ll be none of this on Lingua Pragma. I’ll illustrate (meta-illustrate) the problem by demonstrating classes in ruby.

Example 1

class Dog def speak return 'woof' end end

class Dachshund < Dog end

fido = Dachshund.new fido.speak => 'woof' Example 2

class Foo def bar return 123 end end

class Baz < Foo end

qux = Baz.new qux.bar => 123 Which example conveys more information? Which is easier to quickly grasp? Which would you rather read?

...and it's back up, now that I switched to a slimmer Wordpress theme. Apparently, a Linode 1536 isn't quite enough to handle a basic Wordpress install getting Slash-dotted. (!)

Seems down for us all. mysql db issues. :|