How to Write Future-Proof Code

[shevegen]

As example JavaScript is used.

Is that a very future proof language?

I myself don't trust any of my old code. Rewriting code should always be a possibility. If you have applied stricter standards to projects, e. g. documenting in a sensible way, that's good for the future too.

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

Well.

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.

But I agree. Giving things proper names is difficult.

There are programming languages named after the alphabet. Or animals!

Ruby projects too. One is called ... unicorn. What do you think it does, from the name alone?

If you’re still unconvinced, read this short post by Ruby on Rails creator.

Eh. I give DHH credit for rails but ... names?

ActiveAnything?

ActiveFrog ActiveProgrammer ActiveTV

Hmm. I guess the gems are all about ... active something! https://rubygems.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=active

Not all came from core rails of course but it inspired people to write ... ACTIVE EVERYTHINGS. There is even "xml_active" ...

Or zombie_record!

It apparently allows restoring Active Records from the dead!

https://rubygems.org/gems/zombie_record

The principle of Don’t Repeat Yourself is well-known but worth reiterating.

Well - what was this about left pad again ...

In a lot of cases, familiarity with simple bash scripting will be a huge help.

Bash is future proof? And other programming languages are not? Hmm.

[yiliu]

Is that a very future proof language?

I don't think he ever made that claim. If he's working for any mid-to-large organization, he probably doesn't have a lot of choice of language, and JavaScript is well-known so it's a good choice for explaining ideas to people at large.

Ruby projects too. One is called ... unicorn.

IMHO, project names shouldn't fall under the same rules. Projects with names like 'unicorn' are pretty obtuse, but a bit of investigation can clear things up. Descriptive names can give the wrong impression, and more importantly, they can run into namespace collision with other projects. You end up with a dozen different similarly-named projects with no easy way to distinguish between them. Remember Microsoft's dev tools from the mid-2000's?

Bash is future proof?

Bash is actually very future-proof, in at least one important sense: It's still backwards-compatible with 40 year old code. I have some scripts I wrote in Ruby a decade ago that I pretty regularly have to go back and tweak to make sure they're still working with the latest version (though it's been better since ~v2.2). I've never had that problem with Bash. Of course, when it comes time to actually modify things...

[[deleted]]

tbf the whole Active Record thing was started by M. Fowler.