Comments on: Literate Programming: Elegance and good taste matter! http://tinobox.com/wordpress/coding/literate-programming-elegance-and-good-taste-matter/ Odds and ends of internet entrepreneurship—A Technical Diary Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:26:29 -0800 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc hourly 1 By: Jean-Philippe Daigle http://tinobox.com/wordpress/coding/literate-programming-elegance-and-good-taste-matter/comment-page-1/#comment-114 Jean-Philippe Daigle Sat, 01 Mar 2008 05:42:07 +0000 http://tinobox.com/wordpress/?p=57#comment-114 I agree this do - do not - do - do - do pattern is probably poorly thought-out in this particular case, but sometimes it's not so obvious. Say you need to implement a command-line option for an imaginary program, that enables or disables Nagle's algorithm on sockets owned by that program. How would you name it? Would you call it "enable TCP_NODELAY", which disables Nagle (which is enabled by default) (and wouldn't that be confusing?) Would you call it "disable Nagle's algorithm", which takes the negative route, and thus would clash with the other options? I agree this do – do not – do – do – do pattern is probably poorly thought-out in this particular case, but sometimes it’s not so obvious.

Say you need to implement a command-line option for an imaginary program, that enables or disables Nagle’s algorithm on sockets owned by that program. How would you name it?

Would you call it “enable TCP_NODELAY”, which disables Nagle (which is enabled by default) (and wouldn’t that be confusing?)
Would you call it “disable Nagle’s algorithm”, which takes the negative route, and thus would clash with the other options?

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