Be Idiomatic

I have two or three drafts now that start with the meta of me apologizing for being sparse in my posting of late. TL;DR is that I’ve started a new, out of town engagement and between ramp-up, travel and transitioning off of prior commitments, I’ve been pretty bad at being a regular blogger lately.

Also, special apologies to followers of the Chess TDD series, but my wifi connection in room has just been brutal for the desktop (using the hotel’s little plugin converter), so it’s kind of hard to get one of those posts going. The good news is that what I’m going to be doing next involves a good bit of mentoring and coaching, which lends itself particularly well to vaguely instructional posts, so hopefully the drought won’t last. (For anyone interested in details of what I’m doing, check Linked In or hit me up via email/twitter).

What It Is to Be Idiomatic in Natural Language

Anywho, onto a brief post that I’ve had in drafts for a bit, waiting on completion. The subject is, as the title indicates, being “idiomatic.”

In general parlance, idiomatic refers to the characteristic of speaking a language the way a native would. To best illustrate the difference between language correctness and being idiomatic, consider the expression, “go fly a kite.” If you were to say this to someone who had learned to speak flawless English in a classroom, that person would probably ask, “what kite, and why do you want me to fly it?”

If you said this to an idiomatic USA English speaker (flawless or not), they’d understand that you were using a rather bland imprecation and essentially telling them to go away and leave you alone. And so we make a distinction between technically accurate language (syntax and semantics) and colloquially communicative language. The idiomatic speaker understands, well, the idioms of the local speech.

Being Idiomatic in Programming Language

Applied to programming languages, the metaphor holds pretty well. It’s possible to write syntactically and semantically valid code (in the sense that the code compiles and does what the programmer intends at runtime) that isn’t idiomatic at all. I could offer all manner of examples, but I’ll offer the ones probably most broadly approachable to my reader base. Non-idiomatic Java would look like this:

public void DoSomething()
{
     System.out.print("Hello!");
}

And non-idiomatic C# would look like this:

public void doSomething() {
     Console.WriteLine("Hello!");
}

In both cases, the code will compile, run, and print what you want to print, but in neither case are you speaking it the way the natives would likely speak it. Do this in either case, and you’ll be lucky if you’re just laughed at.

Idiomatic or Nitpicky?

Now you may think that, because of this simple example that touches off a bike-shedding holy war about where to put curly braces that I’m advocating for rigid conformance to coding standards or something.

That’s not my point at all. My point more goes along the lines of “When in Rome, speak like the Romans do.” Don’t walk in and say, “hey Buddy, give me an EX-PRESS-O!” Don’t be bad at speaking the way the community does and proud of it.

Here is a much more subtle and iconic example of what I’m talking about. Do you ever see people in C# do this?

if(null == x)
     throw new NullArgumentException("x");

I once referred to this as “The Yoda” in an old blog post. “If null is x, null argument exception you throw.” Anyone know why people do this, without cheating? Any guesses?

Porting “The Yoda” From C to Other Languages

If you said, “it’s an old C/C++ trick to prevent confusing assignment and comparison,” you’d be right. In C and C++ you could do things like if(x = null) and what the compiler would do would be to assign x to null and then compare it to zero, which would result in it returning true no matter what x had been previously.

Intuitive, right? Well, no, not at all, and so C/C++ programmers got into the habit of yoda-ing to prevent a typo from compiling and doing something weird and unexpected.

And, some of them carry that habit right on through to other languages like C#. But the problem is, in C#, it’s pure cargo cult weirdness. If you make that typo in C#, the compiler just barfs. if(x = null) is not valid C#. So the C++ life-hack is pointless and serves only to confuse C# programmers, as evidenced by questions like this (and, for the record, I did not get the idea for my bloopers post name from Daniel’s answer, even though it predates the post — GMTA, I guess).

Don’t Port Idioms — Adjust To Your New Stack

So, if you’re doing this, the only upside is that you don’t have to change your way of doing things in spite of the fact that you’re using a completely different programming language. But the downside is that you needlessly confuse people. I suspect this and many other instances are a weird, passive-aggressive form of signaling.

People who do this might be saying, “I’m a C++ hacker at heart and you you can take my pointers, but you’ll never take MY CONVENTIONS!!!” And maybe the dyed-in-the-wool Java guys write C# with curly brackets on the same line and vice-versa with C# guys in Java. It’s the geekiest form of passive (aggressive) resistance ever. Or, maybe it’s just habit.

But whatever it is, my advice is to knock it off. Embrace any language you find yourself in and pride yourself how quickly you can become idiomatic and rid yourself of your “accents” from other languages.

Being Idiomatic is the Key to Getting Good Quickly

By really seeking out the conversion, you don’t just appear more versed more quickly, I’d argue that you become more versed more quickly. For instance, if you look around and see that no one in C# uses The Yoda, it might cause you to hit google to figure out why not. And then you learn a language difference.

And there’s plenty more where that came from. Why do people use more enums in language X than in language Y? Why do people do that “throws Blah” at the end of a java method declaration? What’s thing with the {} after a class instantiation in C#? Why is it okay in javascript to assign an integer to “asdf”?

If you’re new to a language and, instead of asking questions like those, you say, “these guys are stupid; I’m not doing that,” you’re balling up an opportunity to learn about language features and differences and throwing it in the trash. It’ll mean getting further out of your comfort zone faster, but in the end, you’ll be a lot better at your craft.