4 ms·

True, this is more like a "cookbook"

• neilv 7y ago
  It looks exactly like what used to probably be called "cookbook". The first cookbook I recall was for Perl, and I later saw other language users try to emulate that, and even use the tasks it identified as a template for their own language's cookbook. I save "idiomatic" for programming linguistic style guidelines that, for many tasks, help select among multiple ways of doing a task (or of larger structuring/approach). For example, in Scheme, tending to avoid mutations, structuring algorithm implementations to use tail calls, using first-class closures, using syntax extension for minilanguages/DSLs, etc. Pythonistas might call their own popular style "Pythonic". There's overlap with cookbook-type stuff. For example, in some language that permits both approaches, maybe the approach of folding over a set of filenames is arguably more idiomatic than the approach of constructing a list of filenames. Consequently, the cookbook example might be of the folding approach. I don't want to call that particular task an idiom, because I find the term useful for a different purpose, but there's overlap. Cookbooks often answer the question "which library and/or calls do I use". If the cookbook spends time on more general tasks, like "coding an algorithm" or "traversing a collection", then the discussion might be more about what's idiomatic in the language. Some of the fuzzy distinction might be analogous to the fuzzy distinction between language and library. Maybe someone has better terms or definitions?