Greppability is an underrated code metric

https://piefed.social/post/380937

Greppability is an underrated code metric

Very good points. A codebase that gets this VERY wrong is Gitlab. I think it might be a dumb characteristic of Ruby programs, but they generate identifiers all over the place. I once had to literally give up following some code because I could not find what it was calling anywhere. Insanity.

Another point: don’t use - in names. Eventually you’ll have to write them down in a programming language, at which point you have to change the name. CSS made this mistake. foo-bar in CSS maps to fooBar in Javascript. Rust also made this mistake with crate names. A crate called foo-bar magically becomes foo_bar in Rust code.

I’ve been working in Ruby on Rails lately (unfortunately) and yeah it’s extremely bad at this. There’s so much hidden implicit behavior everywhere.
Ruby on Rails is the worse thing to ever happen to Ruby. The language is great, much better than Python from a tooling perspective. And then Rails came along and ruined everything. I sincerely believe that the reason Python won out is solely because of Rails, because Ruby is better in every other regard.