On 24.01.2011 22:49, אריה גלזר wrote:
Looking back at the last 20 posts, at least 4-5 of them had very long pieces of
code in them, that required me to copy-paste them to an external editor to dive
deeper into them. IMO that by itself suggests that a better tool is required.
...or a little more work by the author in order to reduce the amount of
posted code to the necessary minimum, and to reformat it to fit in the
body of an email. This action by itself has the very real potential to
pinpoint the actual problem even before the question is posted to the list.
JSFiddle and the various *paste sites can be useful to present code
which is too complex or cannot be easily reduced to a suitable size for
inline posting. They are also handy if you want to make it simple for
your readers to quickly test a piece of code, especially if your code
depends on one of the common libraries. I would see these sites as
complimentary tools for special cases, or for illustration/debugging,
rather than a blanket replacement for inline code.
Requiring all code to be stored on external sites has a number of drawbacks:
- it makes it impossible to reliably search the list archive for certain
functions or identifier names
- it introduces extra dependencies (external sites may be down
temporarily or even close down permanently)
- it makes it hard to follow conversations without constantly opening
pages in a browser
- it could tempt people to create Fiddles from larger, less structured
blobs of code than they would send in a message (*)
I realize of course that not everybody will be disciplined enough to
reduce and reformat their code, but then not everybody is going to go to
the extra effort of creating a Fiddle, either. If somebody asks a
question and just lazily pastes a few pages of unstructured code, their
chances for a helpful reply will be slim.
There's another aspect regarding inline code vs examples in an online
IDE like JSFiddle, but I'm not sure about it, so I'll just put it out
there for comments. This list is named JS*Mentors*, not JSBugfixers.
Maybe I'm reading too much into that, but the name seems to imply that
teaching, discussion, and peer review are important - possibly more so
than getting your code fixed. This is much easier to do if people can
comment on parts of the original code in their replies. That's where you
get helpful advice like "hey, don't use for..in to iterate over arrays
(usually)". If we communicate code via JSFiddle alone, we can't really
do that. In the worst case, conversations could degenerate into
something like this:
A: Why doesn't the click handler fire here: (fiddle link)
B: Try it now: (fiddle link)
A: Doesn't work, it says "addEventListener is not defined"
B: Ok, how about now: (fiddle link)
C: This is even better: (fiddle link)
...and so on. Not much to see or learn for anyone except A, B, and C.
So. How about a compromise:
* Always post code to the list
- unless it really cannot be reduced to an appropriate length,
in which case you should put it on the Web (JSFiddle etc)
* Take care to reduce your example to the minimum required to display
your problem, and reformat it to fit in an email body
- (specifics about formatting TBD)
* If you want your readers to run/debug your code rather than just
look at it, create a Fiddle (or equivalent) as well
* If you insist on posting a ton of unformatted code, don't be
surprised if your question is ignored
regards,
stefan
*) By the way, the folks at comp.lang.java.programmer have something
they call an SSCCE: a Short, Self Contained, Correct (Compilable),
Example. They even have a website to explain the concept
(<http://sscce.org/>). It doesn't apply 100% to something like Fiddles,
but the basic premise is the same: make your example as small as
possible, as correct as possible, but still complete enough to display
your problem.
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