Search: .lenght - Github

https://github.com/search?type=Code&language=JavaScript&q=.lenght&repo=&langOverride=&x=0&y=0&start_value=1

by uyhayuy • 15 years ago

262 97 15 years ago

southern• 15 years ago

A common typo, it seems. But I'm a bit confused as to why this was submitted.

amirhhz• 15 years ago

In JavaScript, if you check for a non-existent property on a variable (e.g. aVar.lenght vs aVar.length) it will return "undefined". So people often rely on this behaviour to check if something is an array or not (no comment on whether this is good or bad), with:

    if(somethingThatMightBeAnArray.length){
        // do things with array
    }

So misspelling of length can be making a lot of code out there behave in an unexpected way.

thousande• 15 years ago

That is a bad thing as String also have a length property

"bar".length; // 3

jpeterson• 15 years ago

The same pattern is widely used to test whether an array-like object is empty. Since a length of 0 is also "falsey", it evaluates as false when the array has no elements. A typo in this case would result in the tested array always being "empty".

kaffeinecoma4• 15 years ago

In a static language this would be flagged as an error. I assume something less than ideal happens in languages such as Ruby.

I once worked at a company where a very early piece of code had a typo "properites" instead of "properties". This misspelling became institutionalized, and was used throughout the codebase because it was deemed too expensive to fix. And this was with a static language (with good IDE refactoring support)!

palish2• 15 years ago

I'm confused as to why they couldn't simply:

  grep -R properites .

Wilya• 15 years ago

In ruby, and I think most dynamic languages, this type of typo is likely to raise an exception. It could hurt, but a simple test run is likely to discover it.

The way javascript (which is what is linked) handles this, as amirhhz described it, leads to silent errors which could turn out a lot worse.

p4lindromica• 15 years ago

There are ways to raise this sort of error even in static languages: objc_sendMessage comes to mind

strictfp• 15 years ago

I had this problem as a junior dev when my english was weaker. The problem stems from that 'height' is spelled with 'ht', but width with 'th'. Since one often write those words in conjunction, it is easy to mix the endings up. If you're then a non-native speaker and don't run spellcheck on your code, you might end up writing 'lenght' and 'heigth' quite a few times, I know I did :)

kissickas• 15 years ago

Is there any context to this or are you just pointing the humor of out how common this is?

kristiandupont• 15 years ago

Well it is basically a list of bugs -- and a rather long one too.

Of course there are rare cases where "lenght" is a variable and that name is used in every instance but mostly, these are bugs in code that we all use.

timdorr• 15 years ago

"hieght" is also a good one: https://github.com/search?type=Code&language=JavaScript&...

alpb• 15 years ago

not an attribute of a standard object type, though.

sjwright3• 15 years ago

Neither is length in many languages.

theli0nheart• 15 years ago

I remember seeing a Github bot a couple weeks ago that strips out whitespace and adds a .gitignore file to a repo (I also remember this really rubbing some people the wrong way). This search indicates that it would probably be useful to have a linter bot running on Github for all the popular languages. It would find syntax errors, common mispellings, and compilation issues, and then submit pull requests to fix the issues.

I have no time to work on something like this myself, but I'm sure a lot of people would find it useful, especially if it acted as a "first defense" before deployment. Curious what other HN'ers think about this.

andrewcamel2• 15 years ago

I actually just replied with a suggestion that Github should implement some built-in functionality for simple error-checking. I think it's a great idea. It would be really helpful if you got a simple little list of notifications for a commit indicating possible error points.

gravitronic• 15 years ago

avoid feature creep! github's platform allows for bots to run, a bot is a perfect way to implement this instead of it being "built-in".

Noughmad• 15 years ago

So basically something like Krazy does with KDE: http://ebn.kde.org/krazy/

Mizza2• 15 years ago

I wrote that bot!

https://github.com/Miserlou/WhitespaceBot

Feel free to fork it to do whatever you want, that's why I made it.

xyzzyb2• 15 years ago

Ah, aggressive trailing whitespace removal. That I can completely get behind. I've already got command-s bound to a custom macro that strips trailing whitespace in TextMate for myself and my co-workers; but this would be an even more inclusive solution.

Stratoscope• 15 years ago

Hey, some of us actually use trailing whitespace! :-)

I use it to create useful indentation guides in Komodo. If the whitespace is stripped away, the indentation guides have gaps where there's a blank line in an indented block.

Maybe Komodo could use a different method to decide where to draw the lines that didn't depend on trailing whitespace. It looks like Sublime Text 2 has a different approach for its indentation guides - maybe the Komodo guys should look at that. But in the meantime I'm using Komodo as it actually works today, so the whitespace on blank lines is important. Let me keep it, please? :-)

I wouldn't mind stripping out trailing whitespace on nonblank lines - that wouldn't affect my precious indentation guides.

But wait a minute, what about Markdown? Two spaces at the end of a line to get a <br>, right? Does the bot skip Markdown files?

Finally, for the folks who have automatic whitespace removal in their editor settings... Please be careful: With this setting, you'll be very likely to make a commit that includes both significant code changes and a mass of whitespace changes in the came commit.

Those kinds of changes should be separated: one commit for the code itself, and a separate commit for the whitespace with a comment like "Whitespace cleanup, no code changes."

This allows people who diff the revision history to diff with whitespace significant most of the time, the only exception being when reviewing a whitespace-only change.

(Edited for friendlier tone...)

xxqs• 15 years ago

in my 10-years old project, removing all trailing whitespace would produce a 1000+ lines commit, and make many contributors' lives harder.

so, thanks, but I'll keep my whitespace.

hartez• 15 years ago

Is there any equivalent of the robots.txt standard for public code repositories? Being able to opt-in to certain bots might be helpful (opt-out being the default, of course).

tux19682• 15 years ago

Perhaps it would be more productive to advocate the use of local pre-commit hooks. Git makes it very easy to configure validation locally long before anything gets sent to Github.

Would be nice if Github provided better documentation and a selection of validation templates to include in new projects. This would better leverage the power of Git and its distributed nature than a bot running on Github.

campnic• 15 years ago

I'll look for more on this, but if you had something you would recommend as a tutorial, I'd appreciate it.

joblessjunkie• 15 years ago

It should be possible to build a bot that automatically generates patches and pull requests for these kinds of typos.

obilgic• 15 years ago

most of them are variable names which is acceptable!

VMG• 15 years ago

Not at all. It's irritating and confusing.

Come back to that code in a year and try to extend it, stuff will break because you start to use the correct name.

andrewcamel2• 15 years ago

It'd be great if Github would scan your code for errors like these and just let you know they exist (in case you didn't want them to, which I would assume you wouldn't for the most part).

veyron• 15 years ago

Someone wrote a spellchecker a while ago using perl spellchecker: http://blog.holdenkarau.com/2011/08/automatic-spelling-corre...

josegonzalez• 15 years ago

For the record, Github's search index is wayyy out of date sometimes. The second user here is me and I deleted that user like two years ago: http://cl.ly/0y271f0T3G0X2J1L022E

eik3_de2• 15 years ago

Same here, I contacted support two times in two years and they said "we're working on it". Obviously, that isn't true and they just don't care about the outdated search index.

holman• 15 years ago

Your latter statement is unequivocally false, for what it's worth. On both counts.

angrycoder• 15 years ago

Even the search has a bug. The query is for ".lenght" but many of the highlighted results are just lenght without the dot.

cpr• 15 years ago

Prob a reg exp so matches any char...

andrewflnr• 15 years ago

But then shouldn't the highlighted bit include the char in front? It's also case insensitive. I think it's trying to be clever.

gren• 15 years ago

What about this one: https://github.com/search?type=Code&language=JavaScript&...

zeratul• 15 years ago

I thought this is actually interesting but I would like to know if >4k misspellings is a lot or not. Here is one way to do it:

    LANGUAGE #LENGHT #LENGTH = #LENGHT/#LENGTH  
    JavaScript 4252 2907459 = 0.0015
    C 18981 2902857 = 0.0065
    Java 7706 2348900 = 0.0033
    Ruby 10789 1690604 = 0.0064
    C++ 9458 1315552 = 0.0072
    PHP 3116 1167924 = 0.0027
    C# 1352 937647 = 0.0014
    Python 3662 737292 = 0.0050
    Ruby 1232 380484 = 0.0032
    Perl 1239 258892 = 0.0048
    Objective-C 679 238051 = 0.0029

P.S. There is something wrong with Github's language breakdown algorithm, sometimes it shows same language twice with a different number of hits.

koenigdavidmj• 15 years ago

C# I can understand being so low, since it's almost always written in Visual Studio or MonoDevelop (both of which provide autocompletion). But how is JavaScript the next lowest?

JesseAldridge• 15 years ago

Hmm, I guess it's because length is a commonly used function in Javascript, but not in other languages. In Python you do len(list) instead, so the word length is more likely to appear in comments and therefore less likely to be corrected.

sjwright3• 15 years ago

Because the built-in .length property is frequently used, and will fail if misspelled.

Whereas C and C++ programs tend to have a lenght operator implemented by the programmer, and from there the error gets snowballed by IDEs and debuggers.

untog• 15 years ago

C# is also a compiled language, so you wouldn't be able to get anything to run with a typo like that hanging around. I find it surprising that there are so many commits making that mistake!

cleaver• 15 years ago

Odd that compiled languages (C, C++, Java) are higher than some interpreted languages (PHP, Javascript). Of course, the search will match comments as well as code, so it may just mean they have better comments.

Also fun to search on "functino".

RandallBrown• 15 years ago

I can't think of anything in C or C++ that uses length off the top of my head. Size and Len, sure, but nothing that's length.

I would guess that most of the spelling errors get propagated through autocomplete. That's how most of the spelling errors in my code get there anyway.

jond3k2• 15 years ago

I noticed another problem is that the highlighter will select the language name as well as the term which means <?php and (c) Copyright are shown instead of the actual mistake.

I put together a GitHub Illiteracy Index script https://github.com/jond3k/sandbox/tree/master/github-illiter... which you can play around with if you like :D

rorrr• 15 years ago

    LANGUAGE   #LENGHT    #LENGTH    = #LENGHT/#LENGTH  
    C#            1352     937647    = 0.0014   <- best
    JavaScript    4252    2907459    = 0.0015
    PHP           3116    1167924    = 0.0027
    Objective-C    679     238051    = 0.0029
    Ruby          1232     380484    = 0.0032
    Java          7706    2348900    = 0.0033
    Perl          1239     258892    = 0.0048
    Python        3662     737292    = 0.0050
    Ruby         10789    1690604    = 0.0064
    C            18981    2902857    = 0.0065
    C++           9458    1315552    = 0.0072   <- worst

flexd2• 15 years ago

And this is why we have testing frameworks.

wahnfrieden• 15 years ago

And static analysis.

azth• 15 years ago

... and compiled languages. Testing won't ensure 100% code coverage.

flexd2• 15 years ago

... and nice things like https://github.com/scrooloose/syntastic for vim (or your editor of choice).

billpg• 15 years ago

My experience is more with languages that are typically compiled and would report this error as an error fairly early on, so the coder would correct it long before checking the code in.

What's the trade-off by having "undefined" returned instead of having an error reported as soon as the code is loaded?

nostrademons• 15 years ago

It prevents you from later defining a 'lenght' method and using it at runtime without a recompile.

For core methods like 'length', it seems silly to think that you'd want to redefine it. And indeed, it's usually counterproductive - that's why any experienced JavaScript dev will have coding conventions like "Don't muck with the prototypes of built-in objects."

But at the application layer, this can be really useful. Imagine you're adding a new field to a message deep in the storage system, and then you want to pass that along to a template in the rendered HTML. It's really useful to be able to do this without recompiling & restarting each individual server between the backend and the frontend, and just edit a few template files and have them automatically pick up any changes to backend data formats.

Ditto adding a new database column, if you're using an RDBMS - it's pretty handy to have your model objects instantly reflect the new field, instead of needing to manually add accessors to each of your model classes. Rails and Django are built on this principle.

Also, you have a versioning problem with statically-compiled code in a distributed system. Imagine that you add this new 'lenght' field to a backend message, and add it to the frontend, and they both compile & deploy. Now imagine that a message from an old backend hits a new frontend (it's not possible to upgrade a whole distributed system at once without downtime). What does the new frontend do with it? It needs a piece of data, but the backend had no idea that it had to provide that piece of data. The only thing it can do is return the equivalent of 'undefined'.

In C++/Java code, you usually deal with these by inventing frameworks. Google code, for example, is littered with

  if (msg.has_new_field()) {
    run_long_complicated_ui_display_routine(msg.new_field());
  } else {
    fall_back_to_old_behavior(msg.old_field());
  }

checks. If you use a more dynamic language like Python, you can use language mechanisms to represent undefined values or fields that are defined at runtime. If you use a static language, you're stuck mimicking them with hashmaps and null.

aardvark179• 15 years ago

Whether your language is compiled is not the issue, it's how you model objects and calling methods on them. In smalltalk and other languages that take a message passing approach doing a.b() sends a message "b" to object a, and the object can do anything it likes with that.

Now the normal (and optimized) route is to find the method on a’s method table and then call that, but if a doesn't have that method then a second method may be called to allow this to be handled. Once you have that sort of mechanism you can make ORM libraries that dynamically examine a schematic at run time and generate accessor methods only as they are needed, decorators, proxies and many other patterns become wonderfully simple, and there are often many more opportunities for meta-programming at run time.

The downside is of course that it becomes harder to find errors when writing or compiling, but tight integration of your development environment with your runtime can help with this.

mrchess• 15 years ago

This reminds me of a US company I worked with that outsourced some of their service layer work to a company with heavy European influence. As a result, API methods also had the spelling of certain words eg. getColour() or getFavourites(). Good times.

xcud• 15 years ago

'wtf' is a good search term when coming into contact with a new codebase; https://github.com/search?type=Code&language=JavaScript&...

justinhj• 15 years ago

For some reason in video game source code I see the word 'hierarchy' in comments spelt wrong a lot in every project I've been on.

j_baker• 15 years ago

Equally scary to me is "UFT8".

https://github.com/search?langOverride=&language=&q=...

speleding• 15 years ago

I just tried "heigth", it's almost as bad.

eik3_de2• 15 years ago

105395 results for heigth, now beat that ;)

jond3k2• 15 years ago

  #  Language    Illiteracy
  1  C           0.02877583  
  2  Perl        0.01635618  
  3  Ruby        0.01560477  
  4  JavaScript  0.01330989  
  5  Shell       0.01235425  
  6  Python      0.01046104  
  7  PHP         0.00910218  
  8  Java        0.00736395

(For height, length and hierarchy, averaged out)

And you thought this would end up being a PHP joke...

https://github.com/jond3k/sandbox/tree/master/github-illiter...

davidmccann• 15 years ago

Recieve. Has to be my number one pet pieve.

https://github.com/search?type=Code&language=JavaScript&...

gus_massa• 15 years ago

In the LaTex editor that I'm using (WinEdt), I have a custom color highlighting that marks \rigth and \heigth in red+bold+strikeout, so I don't have to wait to compile and see a strange error to spot the mistake.

Search: .lenght - Github

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