Just listened to an hour of McCartney on Apple Music, and I love his stuff, but the best songs he did were collaborations with the rest of the band. No one of them had the magic, it was all of them. Take a minute and listen to Lady Madonna. Lennon says he didn't likeit, but I can hear him in it. It's got the edge that McCartney alone doesn't have. Compare it to Maybe I'm Amazed, the first song that the bot picked. It's like listening to part of one channel of a Beatles song. #
Factoring is when you recognize a pattern in your programming that has meaning, so you make it possible to invoke the pattern more simply, making the intent of the code more obvious, reducing opportunities for error, make it possible to build more complex programs. It is not factoring if you replace a pattern with another equally complicated pattern. Factoring is why the software you make in 2023 should be more powerful than the software you did in 2013 and 2003. Factoring happens slowly, usually. Sometimes factoring happens in a moment, when you realize how to reduce something by making a small change somewhere else. Edit This Page was one of those. #
A great example of factoring is the forEach function in JavaScript. There was a pattern, a for loop that iterated over an array with an index. They took out the index and did the iterating for you. It's a small simplification, and I smile every time I use it because the got rid of a little drudge work for me when entering it and reading the code. In no way a big deal, but nice that they found a way to make things easier and faster. I asked ChatGPT why forEach is so great, but they use other "advances" in JavaScript that I consider unnecessary, not useful, cryptic, and I don't use them. #
I am a big believer in paving cowpaths. I believe in it because I see it everywhere in the evolution of products. Why are the controls of my Tesla Model Y arranged the same way my 1974 Datsun B210 was. #
Last update: Saturday October 14, 2023; 10:34 PM EDT.
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)