CommunityNews

CommunityNews

The Database Inside Your Codebase

Navigating codebases of any meaningful size is difficult. Most of a programmer’s time is spent jumping through the codebase, reading or skimming to build a mental model of the constructs and conventions within it. These constructs — among them: the DSLs, interfaces, and taxonomy of types that exist — are arguably the most important precursor to understanding where and how to make changes. But these constructs only exist in programmers’ heads. It’s difficult or impossible to navigate most codebases through the lens of those constructs; programmers lack “code browsers” that present the underlying code independently of files and the filesystem hierarchy. Yet code browsers that can do so — and we’ll look at some examples below — would be incredibly useful. This is because instances of these constructs can be thought of as records in a database, albeit an ad-hoc, poorly-specified database that can only be queried through carefully-crafted regexes1.

In simple cases, some constructs manifest as naming conventions: prefixes in a name may be a rudimentary way to namespace classes2, while suffixes may be a rudimentary way to group classes or identify their type3. But these are easy examples; many patterns are much more subtle.

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

Where Next?

Popular Backend topics Top

lpil
Shayne gave this excellent talk the other day on Gleam, so I thought I’d share it. From my point of view it was really interesting to se...
New
New
First poster: Exadra37
Summary: I describe a simple interview problem (counting frequencies of unique words), solve it in various languages, and compare perform...
New
First poster: bot
Once a year, I look back at the recent developments in the PHP world, and also look forward to what’s to come. And just like in 2020 and ...
New
First poster: bot
This post is a spiritual successor to Loris Cro’s Go cross-compilation. The encounter During a recent stage 2 meeting Jakub Konka wanted...
New
wolf4earth
Louis Pilfold is the creator of the Gleam programming language. He explains what Gleam is and tells us where it came from. He then dives...
New
axelson
I describe how we use Hot Reloading with Webpack to develop faster and show how to integrate Webpack 5, webpack-dev-server, and Phoenix f...
New
tonyxrandall
When DoorDash approached the limits of what our Django-based monolithic codebase could support, we needed to design a new stack that woul...
New
fullstackplus
The Ruby ecosystem is rich with tools that make us developers more productive at what we do. Both Rails and Sinatra have been used to bui...
New
GoulvenClech
Hi everyone :wave: I’m excited to share an article detailing how we have reorganized our Elixir/Phoenix project’s directory structure. W...
New

Other popular topics Top

AstonJ
Do the test and post your score :nerd_face: :keyboard: If possible, please add info such as the keyboard you’re using, the layout (Qw...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build highly interactive applications without ever leaving Elixir, the way the experts do. Let LiveView take care of performance, scalabi...
New
AstonJ
Continuing the discussion from Thinking about learning Crystal, let’s discuss - I was wondering which languages don’t GC - maybe we can c...
New
foxtrottwist
A few weeks ago I started using Warp a terminal written in rust. Though in it’s current state of development there are a few caveats (tab...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Mike Riley @mriley This month, we turn the spotlight on Mike Riley, author of Portable Python Projects. Mike’s book ...
New
AstonJ
If you want a quick and easy way to block any website on your Mac using Little Snitch simply… File > New Rule: And select Deny, O...
New
New
husaindevelop
Inside our android webview app, we are trying to paste the copied content from another app eg (notes) using navigator.clipboard.readtext ...
New
hilfordjames
There appears to have been an update that has changed the terminology for what has previously been known as the Taskbar Overflow - this h...
New
AnfaengerAlex
Hello, I’m a beginner in Android development and I’m facing an issue with my project setup. In my build.gradle.kts file, I have the foll...
New