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I dislike this reasoning, I've heard it many times with all kinds of things but mostly programming languages. I dislike it because the threshold you pick is com

by tomxor 9y ago

I dislike this reasoning, I've heard it many times with all kinds of things but mostly programming languages. I dislike it because the threshold you pick is completely arbitrary, what is to stop you from lowering yourself to the lowest common denominator. As a counter argument... switch this reasoning from syntax to algorithm, if an algorithm is too complex for most people to understand at first glance, do you throw it away in favour of a simple but inferior choice for the problem at hand?

hk__2 9y ago
> switch this reasoning from syntax to algorithm, if an algorithm is too complex for most people to understand at first glance, do you throw it away in favour of a simple but inferior choice for the problem at hand? This is not the same problem. Syntax is only a way of writing the same code in a different way.
- tomxor 9y ago
  An algorithm also solves the same problem. But that doesn't really matter. The point it: It is the same problem, there are many attributes, many choices beyond syntactic choice that affect the comprehension to people unfamiliar to your code. Many of them opinionated and arbitrary, but it's easy to draw the line based on your own experience and unwittingly cast out people with more or less knowledge than yourself as being more obscure or more common.
smichel17 9y ago
I'm not GP poster, but I'd like to dispute this point. > the threshold you pick is completely arbitrary The threshold you pick is the result of a cost/benefit analysis weighing ease of understanding against whatever the benefit of that feature is. In the case of the algorithm, I'd want to know how much faster the complex one runs or how much better its results are. If the answer is, "a fraction of a percent" in both cases, I probably don't care, unless maybe I'm Google and handling enough volume that a fraction of a percent matters.

by tomxor 9y ago

hk__2 9y ago

> switch this reasoning from syntax to algorithm, if an algorithm is too complex for most people to understand at first glance, do you throw it away in favour of a simple but inferior choice for the problem at hand? This is not the same problem. Syntax is only a way of writing the same code in a different way.

tomxor 9y ago
An algorithm also solves the same problem. But that doesn't really matter. The point it: It is the same problem, there are many attributes, many choices beyond syntactic choice that affect the comprehension to people unfamiliar to your code. Many of them opinionated and arbitrary, but it's easy to draw the line based on your own experience and unwittingly cast out people with more or less knowledge than yourself as being more obscure or more common.

smichel17 9y ago

I'm not GP poster, but I'd like to dispute this point. > the threshold you pick is completely arbitrary The threshold you pick is the result of a cost/benefit analysis weighing ease of understanding against whatever the benefit of that feature is. In the case of the algorithm, I'd want to know how much faster the complex one runs or how much better its results are. If the answer is, "a fraction of a percent" in both cases, I probably don't care, unless maybe I'm Google and handling enough volume that a fraction of a percent matters.