4 ms·

All of this is fine if you don't work with others. The point of these tools is to standardize around something to reduce the cognitive load someone has to exper

by useful 6y ago

All of this is fine if you don't work with others. The point of these tools is to standardize around something to reduce the cognitive load someone has to experience contributing to code that they didn't write. The amount of possible paths are commonly reduced for the reader. Linting, snippets, autocomplete, are all things that prevent you from bending the nail or breaking off the head which makes maintenance harder for the person who has to find the nail and remove the nail. If I don't have to redo the nail, the cost of the nail and my time are also saved.

derefr 6y ago
High-friction languages allow you to pump your codebase full of unbounded coupling and complexity, to turn your codebase into a hypercube of connections (subclasses; interfaces; macros; annotations; DSLs; monkey-patches; etc.) IDEs for these languages give you a fancy N-dimensional submarine to efficiently navigate this "wondrous" landscape. Low-friction programming languages just don't give people all those N dimensions of inter-module connectivity in the first place; and for what dimensions they do provide, they steer people away from using them too often, perhaps with opinionated linting, or by building the standard library out of the simple stuff, such that all code that interacts with the stdlib keeps to the same simple style to avoid style-clash. This approach will also "reduce the cognitive load someone has to experience contributing to code that they didn't write"; but it reduces that cognitive load even for people reading the code in a text editor. Or for the maintainers throwing snippets of the code around in a PR / patch-submission mailing-list.
- Scarbutt 6y ago
  For general interest, what programming languages do you classify as low-friction?
  - mjcohen 6y ago
    gawk
- oblio 6y ago
  > subclasses; interfaces; macros; annotations; DSLs; monkey-patches; etc. I think this excludes every programming language known to man, since 1980 or so :-))
  - derefr 6y ago
    It’s not having just one of them is bad; it’s that striving to include as many of them as possible in your language—and not having any convention or constraint discouraging using them all at once—is bad. Look at the code that implements the C++ STL, for example.

by useful 6y ago

derefr 6y ago

High-friction languages allow you to pump your codebase full of unbounded coupling and complexity, to turn your codebase into a hypercube of connections (subclasses; interfaces; macros; annotations; DSLs; monkey-patches; etc.) IDEs for these languages give you a fancy N-dimensional submarine to efficiently navigate this "wondrous" landscape. Low-friction programming languages just don't give people all those N dimensions of inter-module connectivity in the first place; and for what dimensions they do provide, they steer people away from using them too often, perhaps with opinionated linting, or by building the standard library out of the simple stuff, such that all code that interacts with the stdlib keeps to the same simple style to avoid style-clash. This approach will also "reduce the cognitive load someone has to experience contributing to code that they didn't write"; but it reduces that cognitive load even for people reading the code in a text editor. Or for the maintainers throwing snippets of the code around in a PR / patch-submission mailing-list.

Scarbutt 6y ago
For general interest, what programming languages do you classify as low-friction?
- mjcohen 6y ago
  gawk
oblio 6y ago
> subclasses; interfaces; macros; annotations; DSLs; monkey-patches; etc. I think this excludes every programming language known to man, since 1980 or so :-))
- derefr 6y ago
  It’s not having just one of them is bad; it’s that striving to include as many of them as possible in your language—and not having any convention or constraint discouraging using them all at once—is bad. Look at the code that implements the C++ STL, for example.