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Tim @toolbear#spicy@ Taylor πŸŒ»πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦πŸ‡΅πŸ‡ΈβœŠ

@mhoye
I've been experimenting with minimal indentation, fully left-right justified, and trailing whitespace so that all lines are a constant length.

I think trying out worst ideas in an Oblique Strategies way is one of the best ideas.

13 Nov 2023 at 20:55 | Wall-to-wall | Open on tech.lgbt
4 comments
mhoye

@toolbear fully left-justified is interesting, but…. I wonder what fully right justified feels like

13 Nov 2023 at 20:57 | Open on mastodon.social
Tim @toolbear#spicy@ Taylor πŸŒ»πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦πŸ‡΅πŸ‡ΈβœŠ

@mhoye
I've been using the LFSR from the game Pitfall as a practice problem. I keep starting from scratch every so often and see which stylistic and aesthetic choices I keep. Not unlike a painter doing many takes on a scene. In fact, this has been more an art therapy and meditative exercise than hobby coding. Or a mix.

Anyway, an example of some of the POSIX shell script implementing the Pitfall LFSR in the fully justified style. This one is 40 columns x 24 lines, so also organized in "blocks" or "cards", another arbitrary constraint I picked, inspired a bit by HyperCard). The intent is to homebrew a "notebook" coding style (think iPython / Jupyter notebooks) that I can use across any programming language (or config file or tiny DSL etc.).

It's slow going because it's art therapy, but it's also paying off when I tackle new things (like a Skyrim mod manager CLI in CMD.EXE batch script). I don't just think it's navel gazing, though it's also a lot of navel gazing on my part.

@mhoye
I've been using the LFSR from the game Pitfall as a practice problem. I keep starting from scratch every so often and see which stylistic and aesthetic choices I keep. Not unlike a painter doing many takes on a scene. In fact, this has been more an art therapy and meditative exercise than hobby coding. Or a mix.
13 Nov 2023 at 21:11 | Open on tech.lgbt
Tim @toolbear#spicy@ Taylor πŸŒ»πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦πŸ‡΅πŸ‡ΈβœŠ

@mhoye (also attempting zero side effects, purely functional, purely deterministic, and using pattern matching instead of if-else conditionals, and anything else I think to add that frees me from ever having to actually finish one of these pieces of "art")

13 Nov 2023 at 21:15 | Open on tech.lgbt
Tim @toolbear#spicy@ Taylor πŸŒ»πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦πŸ‡΅πŸ‡ΈβœŠ

@mhoye one reason the fixed, constant column width is something I'm curious about is that it would make right-justified (say, in a right-to-left language) look & feel just as normal as our left-justified, primarily written in English code does today.

A bunch of our tools have a lot of bias baked into them. Even the notion of "trailing whitespace" which is taken to mean "extra whitespace to the right of the last non-whitespace" and almost certainly isn't implemented in a right-to-left language neutral way.

So part of this is an exploration of the limits and biases of our software development tooling and common practices.

Enough infodumping for now. And also I think I did this to you several months back already :)

@mhoye one reason the fixed, constant column width is something I'm curious about is that it would make right-justified (say, in a right-to-left language) look & feel just as normal as our left-justified, primarily written in English code does today.

A bunch of our tools have a lot of bias baked into them. Even the notion of "trailing whitespace" which is taken to mean "extra whitespace to the right of the last non-whitespace" and almost certainly isn't implemented in a right-to-left language neutral way.

13 Nov 2023 at 21:18 | Open on tech.lgbt
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