Raise your hand if you have ever said, “I wish I could use C-s and C-q in Firefox.”

Evan linked to this much earlier today, and I wanted to share it, but the blog was out of order. (I broke it.)

Anyway, a discussion of life and happiness and success and wealth and what matters to people and so on, in the UK versus over here. I keep seeing examples of this and it makes me wonder if I really want to stay here.

I’m big on code being clear and succint and self-documenting, so I like to put some thought into variable and function names. It’s a bit like writing prose. You might think of one word initially, but it’s not the “right” word, so you refer to a dictionary, a thesaurus, or another piece of writing.

In programming, there are not very good resources for this. Most reference texts intentionally have simplified examples because they’re trying to provide information about a language or library and not the expressitivity of the contrived problem at hand. Existing real-world code generally sucks.

Generally, I don’t want to explain the how, I want to explain the what and why. What I wish existed is something like a thesaurus of abstractions and design patterns—not someone’s idea of what they should be, but a wiki where everyone could share what sort of complex thing they were trying to make obvious and what solutions they considered, rejected, or were satisfied with.

There’s quite a bit in the original WikiWikiWeb about this, but that wiki’s scope is much larger so most of the enlightenment you can get from it is in other areas.