leifw

If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.

...

But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

--Paul Graham on small identities

In 2007 Australian conglomerate Babcock and Brown wanted to buy the main supplier of power to Montana, Northwestern Energy. Eventually, the Montana Public Service commission prevented the deal, basically on the grounds that they couldn't imagine BBI doing anything other than squeezing capital out of NWE hurting consumers. Recently, BBI has been forced to sell off all its assets to pay off its debts. Its market capitalization fell from many billions to effectively zero.

I hate C#'s #region directive. Far too many folks abuse it. Even when it's not abused, Visual Studio's default settings (at least once upon a time) didn't allow you to search in a closed region, which drove me crazy. Jeff Atwood had a thorough piece about #region's evils.

A coworker of mine was about to go postal after dealing with some highly #regioned code, so I offered to fix it up for him. There are probably a bajillion ways to remove regions already, but here's another. This assumes you've got a Unix environment at your disposal.

1. Get a fresh check out of your source code
2. Change to a directory that you want to fix recursively.
3. Get a list of all the files that contain regions and store it for later.
   grep --include='*.cs' -lRP '#region|#endregion' * | tee files
4. Ensure that grep found approximately the expected number of files.
5. Remove all of lines with regions.
   for $i in `cat files`; do sed -ibak -r '/#region|#endregion/d' $i; done
6. Ensure your code builds and your unit tests pass.
7. Remove whitespace from lines which contain only whitespace.
   for i in `cat files`; do sed -i -r 's/^[ \t]+$//' $i; done
8. Ensure your code builds and your unit tests pass.
9. Remove consecutive blank lines, leaving a single blank line.
   for i in `cat files` ; do sed -i '$!N; /^\(\)\n\1$/!P; D' $i; done
10. Ensure your code builds and your unit tests pass.
11. Commit!