Browsing erb.rb, part 1

Today's installment of One Month Codebase is a short browseof Masotoshi Seki's ruby/lib/erb.rb

It's 902 loc, not that hefty, and as we'll see, rather straightforward.

First, the introductory comments. The first 255 lines are great documentation. Several examples showing off different aspects, clear writing. It should make your day.

Pop open a buffer and type in these examples. They may seem trivial, and you really want to get to the meaty bits. Do it anyway. It may turn out that the example usage contains a bug, in which case in a few minutes you could contribute back to the project. If the code works, the sheer act of typing it out, running it, debugging your typos etc, will doubtless put you in the mindset of wondering where you can use

this technique. Hell, halfway through this you may have a brainfart that turns into a full project. At the very least, you will be accomplishing the important goal of playing with the code.

A good idea is to take one pomodoro (half an hour) per example. Keep another buffer open to jot down thoughts so you can come back to them later.

Now that you know how erb.rb is used, you can see how it works. Give yourself half an hour to skim the code, noting in a buffer points of interest, oddnesses, places where you need more comments. A good rule of thumb is that you should make a note of any oddly long method or class. These long methods and classes are great places for improvement: they're ripe to be refactored and simplified. Make a note

of any class or method that seems to be doing too many things, and ask yourself why it absolutely shouldn't be broken up. Sometimes there's a good reason, other times you will be saving countless people from horrible frustration.

Time: 1 pom