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Expressive does not always mean "unnecessary clever", having less boilerplate is enormous advantage by itself. Consider that java until very recently didn't eve

Expressive does not always mean "unnecessary clever", having less boilerplate is enormous advantage by itself. Consider that java until very recently didn't even have lambda expressions. You might say: but IDEs help with boilerplate! True to a point. Someone still has to sift through the tons of unnecessary generated LOC crap just to get to the issue at hand. Again, I'm not writing this to bash on java, I'm simply trying to show that search for "holy grail of programming languages" is far from fruitless, and it fills me with joy when I see more languages being developed and tried in different niches (clojure, rust, go, elixir — these are all different and awesome at the same time).

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> You might say: but IDEs help with boilerplate! True to a point. Someone still has to sift through the tons of unnecessary generated LOC crap just to get to the issue at hand. Yeah. IDEs may help with writing boilerplate, but most of the time you're not writing code - you're reading it. And every small bit of boilerplate Java adds pretty much everywhere (and C++, and C#, and other similar languages) is a bit you have to read, parse and decide if it's relevant. It obscures the meaning the code was supposed to express and make understanding the code a much more cognitively demanding task. (IDEs could help by detecting and folding boilerplate, but if they could do that, then why not just write your code in that folded-boilerplate language directly?)