Re: Writing and maintaining a medium-sized code base

["Pierre Chapuis" <catwell@...>]

My solution to that is typically:

- Use luacheck [1]. Not passing luacheck should be the same as failing
  the test suite. You can write a custom .luacheckrc with exceptions
  for your project, but never use globals in modules.

- Do write unit tests. If you are wondering about which test harness to
  use, use Busted [2]. C.I. is not mandatory if you support a single
  platform but it is very useful if you support several (especially if you 
  support several Lua language versions).

- There is no easy solution to the "I depend on the framework evvironment"
  issue. My  personal solution is the I and D in SOLID [3], i.e.: use many
  small interfaces and make your business logic depend on them, not the
  other way around. If you have not seen it you may want to watch
  "Architecture, the lost years" which is a talk about Ruby on Rails
  but explains this principle well [4]. You may also look at Go code bases,
  because Go encourages this style. This doesn't prevent you from mocking,
  but at least it lets you do it easily.

- Even though I like some Object-Oriented principles, I am not an
  advocate for Object-Oriented code. Basically I create instances
  for objects that need state and I use simple functions in modules
  for things that don't; I never use inheritance. But I guess this is
  more of a personal choice than anything.

- At my current company we use ldoc [5] for documentation. Sometimes I 
  prefer just plain human-edited Markdown files. In any case make sure
  to keep documentation up to date.

[1] https://github.com/mpeterv/luacheck
[2] https://github.com/Olivine-Labs/busted
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID_(object-oriented_design)
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpkDN78P884
[5] https://github.com/stevedonovan/LDoc