Jan 21, 2008
Had a nice email discussion amongst the Centronians the other day about what beautiful code is. The discussion came about due to a challenge I put out to the team to improve a certain nested conditional branch in the Identity Matcher method, match_foaf.
Seems as though there are some strong opinions from some that readability of code is secondary to the performance of code. I figured I would some up my thoughts and did so in the following matrix:
To be clear, this is the code in question:
if foaf.has_key? '<>'
knows = foaf['<>']["<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/knows>"]
if !knows.nil?
knows.each do |know|
if foaf.has_key? know
person_id = foaf[know]["<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person>"]
if !person_id.nil? and person_id.size > 0
person = foaf[person_id[0]]
if !person['<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/nick>'].nil? and person['<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/nick>'].size > 0
nicks << person['<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/nick>'][0]
end
if !person['<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/member_name>'].nil? and person['<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/member_name>'].size > 0
names << person['<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/member_name>'][0]
end
end
end
end
end
end
Keep an eye on Slick or Slack for this little piece of code I threw up there. If my assumption is right, it will be one of the slackest of all.
Update
- Slick or Slack no longer exists :(
