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Ask HN: What kind of Software "Jigs" do you have?

7 points by elisk ↗ HN
In woodworking and other crafts there are Jigs that are used and built for the purpose of creating something else - it's a tool or a device specifically made to and while making something else.

Do you have such Jigs in software? if so what kind of jigs do you use? How do you use them?

6 comments

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48864w6ui
Any library?

Edit: staged computation?

kingkongjaffa
Do Makefiles count?

I set up various incantations like:

make build

make run

make test

make lint

mikewarot
Long ago the libraries I wrote in Turbo Pascal were a sort of jig. The way I wrote comments was another.

  12/31/2023 - MAW - Added example
I think of a lot of conventions and practices that I always did, no matter what as something like a foundation.

The pkZip archives on floppy disk, got replaced with Git eventually. It's a new, better jig. Or maybe better yet is the .ignore file I always copy into a new repo.

ksherlock
There are a lot of code generators, like lex/flex, bison/yacc, re2c, ragel, lemon, antlr, gperf, xxd. Maybe they don't count because they're pre-existing tools, but you can see how they might have started as a one-off tool and grew from there. I've written plenty of my own, either to generate code or generate tables of data at compile time.
vvendigo
Script generating DBO class skeleton from DB table (I've made and used 20 years ago).
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