Innovation On The Run » say sofware mac http://www.innovationontherun.com Ruminations about innovation and software by Rob Di Marco Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:44:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Does Your Code Sound Good? http://www.innovationontherun.com/does-your-code-sound-good/ http://www.innovationontherun.com/does-your-code-sound-good/#comments Wed, 14 May 2008 22:47:12 +0000 Rob Di Marco http://www.innovationontherun.com/?p=47 About six months ago, I switched my work computer to a MacBook Pro.  Today, I read a LifeHacker tip talking about easily forgotten/not know about Mac features. One that I had never heard of was using the say command, a terminal command that will speak whatever text you send to it.

> say Hello World # Will speak from
> say -f /etc/hosts # Will read out your /etc/hosts file

Hmm….I wonder how my code sounds.  I’ve always been a big fan of the development concept that your code shouldn’t need a ton of comments if it reads well.  But how would it sound…

Turns out some Java code sounded pretty good.  I could definitely visualize and understand the class as it was being read to me.  But some Ruby code I was working on sounded terrible; I chalk it up to the lack of verbosity in the language. 

Another interesting use of the command for me is for README files.  I usually lack the patience to read a whole README file, but I have good retention of those things that I hear.  So when I see a README file, I can now just have say read it aloud to me and I get the content as I dive into whatever I am doing!

 

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