Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous

Ary Manzana ary at esperanto.org.ar
Thu Mar 8 15:42:57 PST 2012


On 3/8/12 4:04 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Thursday, March 08, 2012 06:55:17 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 21:14:34 -0500, Ary Manzana<ary at esperanto.org.ar>
>>
>> wrote:
>>> The problem is not mistaking it with something else. The problem is when
>>> you want to write it. In Ruby my mind works like this:
>>>
>>> Mind: "How would I get a span for 5 seconds?"
>>> Mind: "Let's try 5.seconds"
>>> Mind: "Wow, it works!"
>>>
>>> I'm trying to remember cases when I just wrote what my mind thought it
>>> was correct and I was *so* surprised it worked out of the box in Ruby.
>>> Like writing array.last, and get it to work, instead of
>>> array[array.length - 1]. But in D, from the docs
>>> (http://dlang.org/arrays.html )
>>>
>>> bar[$-1] // retrieves last element of the array
>>>
>>> I read: bar dollar minus one wait what??
>>
>> array.back;
>>
>> http://dlang.org/phobos/std_array.html#back
>>
>> This is the issue with "intuition". It's easy to say, "hey I guessed
>> right in Ruby! Ruby must be more intuitive!". But if you were someone
>> who knew the range interfaces, wouldn't you try array.back in Ruby and say
>> "well, obviously D is more intuitive, it knew what I wanted without even
>> looking up the docs!"
>>
>> You are never going to come up with something that's *perfectly* intuitive
>> for everyone in every situation.
>
> Yeah. I don't understand how anyone can expect to just write code and have it
> work without looking anything up.

I just stumbled upon this again in Ruby. I have a time object. I want to 
know if it's in the past. I wrote:

time.past?

it worked! :-)


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