Goofy Program Files: jlink

After my last (aka, the inaugural) goofy program entry, I was overwhelmed with feedback¹ that people wanted more, and who am I to deny them?

Today’s entry is a program I call jlink (for “Jira link”).² We use Jira at work for task tracking, and the ticket identifiers (like “ABC-1234”) wind up littering everything we do. One day at work I was writing a document that had a long listing of Jira tickets, and I wanted to add links to them. I was doing that by: a) opening the Jira page for the ticket; b) ⌘L to select the address bar; c) ⌘C to copy; d) changing back to the tab I was writing in; e) ⌘K to open the add-link dialog; f) ⌘V to paste.

After doing this a bunch of times, I thought to myself “there’s got to be a better way!” (Incidentally, this runs through my head every time in David Cross’s voice, from his timeless bit about electric scissors.) Then, I spent 10 minutes (probably; maybe less) writing this program:

This program is very simple (recall that I really think of these as “stupid programs”). There is some basic argument parsing, and then it takes the first command-line argument you give it, turns it into uppercase, makes an appropriate URL, and causes it to wind up on my clipboard.³

Here are some things I like about this program:

1. Python’s default option parser is nice. It’s not my favorite option parser in the world (that’s a tossup between clap and Getopt::Long::Descriptive, depending on what kind of mood I’m in), but it’s easy enough to write, provides --help without needing to do anything, and handles dealing with positional parameters in ARGV just fine.⁴

2. Python f-strings are nice; one of the reasons I didn’t like Python many years ago is that interpolating variables in strings was super weird. As a Perl programmer I realize I have no basis for complaining about weird syntax, but "Hello %s" % "world" still feels so strange to me. "Hello {}".format("world") is better I guess, but f-strings are actually good and intuitive!

3. The subprocess module makes a bunch of things easy might otherwise be tedious. You can do this correctly in Perl using only the built-in stuff (maybe using open, for crying out loud!), but more often I’d reach for IPC::Run3 or Capture::Tiny, plus Process::Status. The subprocess docs in Python are often confusing to me (actually, I find most of the Python docs to be sort of hard to navigate), but it’s trivial to just run a program and grab its output, having the program fail if something goes wrong.

4. This program is written for me alone. I don’t need to think about whether this program works on Linux (it doesn’t), because I don’t run Linux. If pbcopy fails, or I get an ugly exception; that’s fine, I don’t care. If run jlink foo it will happily copy a link to the bogus url ending in /FOO; that’s fine too. If I were writing a non-goofy program, I’d make sure the exceptions were friendly, and do a bunch of error-checking up front to make sure the user wasn’t surprised. As is, the program is for me; if it breaks, I won’t be surprised, because it’s a stupid program!

This last thing is, I think, the best thing about goofy programs. I do care a lot about code quality, and software as craft, and maintainability, and all that other stuff. But at the end of the day, computers are just tools to make humans’ lives a little easier, and sometimes the only human I need to satisy is myself. There’s a time and a place for everything, after all, and I like the place these goofy programs occupy in my life.

Tagged: programming, goofy programs, python