3 ms·

Agree. I think we're all Stringly-typed developers. We use strings everywhere. We throw strings across system boundaries at will.

hinkley 9y ago
The first time I ran into this was on a project that was passing contact information around like String, String, String, int. Back and forth across the system in four or five workflows with extra data passed in here and there. Of course they left off Address Line 2 and rather than try to fix this in thirty places as I was told I made an Address object instead. With very rare exception, a street Address (Address 1) is meaningless without at least the zip code. And god help us if you had two addresses. Later it took someone a couple hours to fix it for 9 digit zip codes. No further changes unless a new State joins the union (this was for a state court system and they required a domestic mailing address. One of the few times I didn't eventually need to process international addresses)
seanp2k2 9y ago
If you're just using objects to represent groupings of strings and encapsulate behavior around converting them back to strings for output at some point, why not just operate on the strings instead of all the serialization / deserialization? Maybe enough of the quick stuff I do isn't enough to warrant more complex data structures, but I get pretty far into a problem with just dicts (in Python) and generally get annoyed when something returns back objects that have no easy str representation without finagling the object into giving me what I need. I think that this is generally a bigger issue with libraries and treating object metadata (stuff like time stamps, extra attributes, etc) as of equal importance as the data it represents; if an object has one obvious attribute for what the thing is, make that the default thing you get when you just refer to the thing, instead of making everyone call some weird method to turn the instance into the representation that you likely want to get out of it.
- cormacrelf 9y ago
  cat your_comment.txt | fold -w 80 -s | grep that | head -n 1 | sed "s/ have/'d be/" | sed 's/n/to/' | cut -d's' -f1-2
  - msla 9y ago
    If you're going to be snarky, fix the useless use of cat.
- nickbauman 9y ago
  This is one of the major reasons why I love Lisp so much. Serialization problems disappear in homoiconic languages. It eliminates an entire class of issues.
jerf 9y ago
"We use strings everywhere." That's bad. "We throw strings across system boundaries at will." That's neither good nor bad, it's just inevitable. The point of not using "strings" is that strings generally do not have the semantics of whatever it is you are really dealing with, because strings are just raw sequences of bytes and are generally too permissive for the specific type. For instance, if you have a URI, that comes with a list of restrictions for validity such as "can't start with a colon". Programming-language strings aren't URLs because they permit starting with invalid scheme declarations, or being empty. However, when crossing system boundaries, you are exposed in some sense to the raw truth of the hardware, which is "raw sequences of bytes" is the only thing that really exists. When someone sends you something claimed to be a "URI", you really can't blindly count on that, if you want robust code you are going to have to validate that. Even if you work very hard and use higher-level abstractions to try to map things to higher-level types, you still have the problem that the semantics have to be an exact match for this to work; in one program the URI type only permits http and https, in another it permits arbitrary (valid) schemes, and there you go, there's a difference sufficient that you must validate. To match semantics between two programs sufficiently that you can claim with a straight face that you really, truly aren't throwing "strings" across system boundaries requires incredibly tight coupling between all participating programs.
- nickbauman 9y ago
  Tight coupling ... or just s-expressions ;)
  - jerf 9y ago
    S-expressions are irrelevant to my point. S-expressions are just a serialization format; the use of S-expressions does nothing to synchronize semantics between two programs. Labeling a string as a "uri" with an s-expression does nothing to solve the problem I mentioned about mismatched semantics between two programs. In fact, it does nothing to solve (uri "::::::////SUPERINVALID"). Behold the fundamental problem with semantics and why the semantic web has never worked out as its advocates hoped; labeling is the easy part of the problem.

hinkley 9y ago

The first time I ran into this was on a project that was passing contact information around like String, String, String, int. Back and forth across the system in four or five workflows with extra data passed in here and there. Of course they left off Address Line 2 and rather than try to fix this in thirty places as I was told I made an Address object instead. With very rare exception, a street Address (Address 1) is meaningless without at least the zip code. And god help us if you had two addresses. Later it took someone a couple hours to fix it for 9 digit zip codes. No further changes unless a new State joins the union (this was for a state court system and they required a domestic mailing address. One of the few times I didn't eventually need to process international addresses)

seanp2k2 9y ago

If you're just using objects to represent groupings of strings and encapsulate behavior around converting them back to strings for output at some point, why not just operate on the strings instead of all the serialization / deserialization? Maybe enough of the quick stuff I do isn't enough to warrant more complex data structures, but I get pretty far into a problem with just dicts (in Python) and generally get annoyed when something returns back objects that have no easy str representation without finagling the object into giving me what I need. I think that this is generally a bigger issue with libraries and treating object metadata (stuff like time stamps, extra attributes, etc) as of equal importance as the data it represents; if an object has one obvious attribute for what the thing is, make that the default thing you get when you just refer to the thing, instead of making everyone call some weird method to turn the instance into the representation that you likely want to get out of it.

cormacrelf 9y ago
cat your_comment.txt | fold -w 80 -s | grep that | head -n 1 | sed "s/ have/'d be/" | sed 's/n/to/' | cut -d's' -f1-2
- msla 9y ago
  If you're going to be snarky, fix the useless use of cat.
nickbauman 9y ago
This is one of the major reasons why I love Lisp so much. Serialization problems disappear in homoiconic languages. It eliminates an entire class of issues.

jerf 9y ago

"We use strings everywhere." That's bad. "We throw strings across system boundaries at will." That's neither good nor bad, it's just inevitable. The point of not using "strings" is that strings generally do not have the semantics of whatever it is you are really dealing with, because strings are just raw sequences of bytes and are generally too permissive for the specific type. For instance, if you have a URI, that comes with a list of restrictions for validity such as "can't start with a colon". Programming-language strings aren't URLs because they permit starting with invalid scheme declarations, or being empty. However, when crossing system boundaries, you are exposed in some sense to the raw truth of the hardware, which is "raw sequences of bytes" is the only thing that really exists. When someone sends you something claimed to be a "URI", you really can't blindly count on that, if you want robust code you are going to have to validate that. Even if you work very hard and use higher-level abstractions to try to map things to higher-level types, you still have the problem that the semantics have to be an exact match for this to work; in one program the URI type only permits http and https, in another it permits arbitrary (valid) schemes, and there you go, there's a difference sufficient that you must validate. To match semantics between two programs sufficiently that you can claim with a straight face that you really, truly aren't throwing "strings" across system boundaries requires incredibly tight coupling between all participating programs.

nickbauman 9y ago
Tight coupling ... or just s-expressions ;)
- jerf 9y ago
  S-expressions are irrelevant to my point. S-expressions are just a serialization format; the use of S-expressions does nothing to synchronize semantics between two programs. Labeling a string as a "uri" with an s-expression does nothing to solve the problem I mentioned about mismatched semantics between two programs. In fact, it does nothing to solve (uri "::::::////SUPERINVALID"). Behold the fundamental problem with semantics and why the semantic web has never worked out as its advocates hoped; labeling is the easy part of the problem.