Design for readability – A primer on code typography (opens in new tab)

(medium.com)

11 pointsameyakarve8y ago7 comments

7 comments

> Lexicographical sorting by class-name to make things easier to find

This is weird. I've never encountered (or noticed) ordering parameters by their type names. Semantic ordering (subject, object, adverb, optionals) makes more sense to me - especially if you see type names only once at declaration, but have to guess/deduce parameters order at every call site.

aetherspawn8y ago

I agree, I think the most relevant arguments should be first and dilute out to less relevant arguments (eg. it’ll probably still work if you pass null or zero).

Then you can typically collate your useless short arguments on one line and you don’t get wierd formatting at the call sites, right?

ameyakarveOP8y ago

It does make sense. I'll experiment with a combination of the two going forward (probably semantic first, lexicographical later)

seandougall8y ago

Among other issues, it breaks down completely as soon as you have subclasses of any sort.

asamarin8y ago

And it's even impossible to do in some cases, e.g. default arguments in C++, which must be at the end of parameter list

kqr8y ago

I really like the look of that right-aligned thing and I wonder if it works in practise. Any way to get Emacs to do that for me?

Derbasti8y ago

M-x align-regexp

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