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The results on code lines being directly related to bugs is getting old. Programming languages and practices have changed substantially in the past couple of de

by jerf 7y ago

The results on code lines being directly related to bugs is getting old. Programming languages and practices have changed substantially in the past couple of decades. I'd want to see more recent evidence. Besides, in practice I find lines of code in Go vs. Python are only maybe 20% different in many common cases, if you ignore the struct declarations which I have a hard time calling "code". (Being not a Turing complete language, that particular subset can't be considered vulnerable to the issues that Turing complete things can have.) I find myself very frequently wondering how many people complaining about all the lack of abstraction in Go have A: used it and B: used it to the point they're writing Go in Go. (Go just blows if you're trying to write Python in Go or something, or if you insist that you know better and must use map, filter, etc. rather than for loops. For all languages X, writing X in X is important, but Go is really graceless if you don't learn how.) Now, if you do get to B, it is still true that Go does not quite abstract as "well" as some other languages, but it does abstract well enough that you can start having reasonably conversations about whether those other abstraction tools are actually paying their way in a lot of larger, shared code bases. If we throw out a ton of language complexity, but only pay a relatively small price, are they really carrying their weight? The answer will vary from code base to code base, but I think it's not necessarily some sort of horrid, unthinkably idea that not every program must be assaulted with the most powerful, complicated toolkit regardless of the price incurred by the complication.

coldtea 7y ago
>The results on code lines being directly related to bugs is getting old. Programming languages and practices have changed substantially in the past couple of decades. The results in those "past decades" used all kinds of languages, some far more advanced and modern than Go is today (e.g. Lisp, Smalltalk, Ada).
- _ph_ 7y ago
  As someone who programs both in Lisp and in Go (and I have used a little bit of Smalltalk), I have to comment your statement. In a sense, Lisp is the most advanced language ever designed, and still, it is ignored by most of the programming community :). Equally, I think, Smalltalk does object orientation better than most languages which followed it. Both languages are mostly dynamically typed, so comparisons to static typed languages need to take this into respect, they are different beasts. On the other side, I think Go has an interesting mix out of static and dynamic typed features, having interfaces for static contracts and interface{} as a fully dynamic type, which still offers full type safety at runtime. Go structs have also some interesting properties, if you look at them beyond being containers. Any type can have methods, and structs can embed other structs and thus "inhert" their methods in a sense. This is not full blown object orientation, but gets you surprisingly far.
- jerf 7y ago
  If we're going to quote science, we need to use it scientifically. It may be the case that all the changes in the decades since those studies are irrelevant, but we really can't just assume that. Even if we assume that the results of those studies are even relevant to real programming in the first place, since IIRC they, like almost every other study ever done on programming, did all their analysis on completely toy problems.

by jerf 7y ago

coldtea 7y ago

>The results on code lines being directly related to bugs is getting old. Programming languages and practices have changed substantially in the past couple of decades. The results in those "past decades" used all kinds of languages, some far more advanced and modern than Go is today (e.g. Lisp, Smalltalk, Ada).

_ph_ 7y ago
As someone who programs both in Lisp and in Go (and I have used a little bit of Smalltalk), I have to comment your statement. In a sense, Lisp is the most advanced language ever designed, and still, it is ignored by most of the programming community :). Equally, I think, Smalltalk does object orientation better than most languages which followed it. Both languages are mostly dynamically typed, so comparisons to static typed languages need to take this into respect, they are different beasts. On the other side, I think Go has an interesting mix out of static and dynamic typed features, having interfaces for static contracts and interface{} as a fully dynamic type, which still offers full type safety at runtime. Go structs have also some interesting properties, if you look at them beyond being containers. Any type can have methods, and structs can embed other structs and thus "inhert" their methods in a sense. This is not full blown object orientation, but gets you surprisingly far.
jerf 7y ago
If we're going to quote science, we need to use it scientifically. It may be the case that all the changes in the decades since those studies are irrelevant, but we really can't just assume that. Even if we assume that the results of those studies are even relevant to real programming in the first place, since IIRC they, like almost every other study ever done on programming, did all their analysis on completely toy problems.