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Hacker news has a really hard time valuing simplicity. I think it’s an egotistical thing: I’m smart so I don’t need a simple language. What people miss is that

Hacker news has a really hard time valuing simplicity. I think it’s an egotistical thing: I’m smart so I don’t need a simple language. What people miss is that a simple a language allows you to apply your smarts to solving the actual problems in front of you instead of puzzling over language features. You can only handle so much cognitive load at once, and ideally the vast majority of that should be devoted to whatever problem you’re solving, not to the language itself. Ironically, this fact is the same fact that makes complex languages more fun for hobbyists. There’s simply more to explore, and to try, and to solve, when your object isn’t building a product but instead playing with a language. It’s a different purpose, but people very rarely acknowledge this fact, likely because they’d rather pretend their purposes are clearly mechanical and business oriented. It’s ok to just want to have fun sometimes.

the_duke 6y ago
That's an interesting observation. It definitely has merit. I've run into this exact same thing in type-system heavy languages like Haskell/Scala/Rust, where I spend more time juggling abstractions than implementing features. But there is an additional dimension: abstractions often make the first implementation much more cumbersome. But most code is maintained and read much more than it is written, and abstractions can make extending and maintaining a code base much easier. It's also good to remember that the existence of certain language abstractions doesn't mean you have to use them. You have to find the right tradeoff.
- philosopher1234 6y ago
  Another point I disagree with the consensus about! Abstractions have their place, but a bad abstraction ends up spending more of its life getting torn down than it does productively simplifying the code. In my opinion each abstraction increases system cognitive load, and so they should only be added “lazily”, ie when empirical experience with the code proves that a particular abstraction would have broad and deep utility.
- pron 6y ago
  But simple languages don't mean more cumbersome abstraction -- take Scheme for example -- while C++ and Haskell's maintenance record isn't particularly great (Rust doesn't have one yet).
cjohansson 6y ago
In all programming languages you must understand how the parser will understand and translate what you write, it sounds like Zig will always know your intentions and maximize your code, it sounds too good to be true
- pron 6y ago
  If Zig were a high-level language it wouldn't have been so impressive. There are plenty of simple high-level languages. But in low-level domains there is a lot of extra accidental complexity because you need to precisely define layout, control memory allocation and placement, and try to avoid, or at least control branches or dynamic dispatch. And you need to do all that in the worst-case, and you don't have a JIT. So far there have been two approaches -- C, which is linguistically simple but inexpressive and spectacularly unsafe, and C++/Ada/Rust, which is much safer and much more expressive but incredibly complex. Zig finds a new way, not through some magic, but through really exceptional and radical design.
  - cjohansson 6y ago
    But low-level languages also get translated by a parser so I don't see the difference.. Maybe you mean that languages has less abstractions and because of this simplier translations? Think I need to try Zig out to get a grip on it..
    - pron 6y ago
      I mean that in low-level languages the name of the game is how to work with low-level details, and Zig's design makes it exceptionally pleasant as it uses the same language for those details as it does for the logic. There is no magic here, just very clever and careful design.

the_duke 6y ago

That's an interesting observation. It definitely has merit. I've run into this exact same thing in type-system heavy languages like Haskell/Scala/Rust, where I spend more time juggling abstractions than implementing features. But there is an additional dimension: abstractions often make the first implementation much more cumbersome. But most code is maintained and read much more than it is written, and abstractions can make extending and maintaining a code base much easier. It's also good to remember that the existence of certain language abstractions doesn't mean you have to use them. You have to find the right tradeoff.

philosopher1234 6y ago
Another point I disagree with the consensus about! Abstractions have their place, but a bad abstraction ends up spending more of its life getting torn down than it does productively simplifying the code. In my opinion each abstraction increases system cognitive load, and so they should only be added “lazily”, ie when empirical experience with the code proves that a particular abstraction would have broad and deep utility.
pron 6y ago
But simple languages don't mean more cumbersome abstraction -- take Scheme for example -- while C++ and Haskell's maintenance record isn't particularly great (Rust doesn't have one yet).

cjohansson 6y ago

In all programming languages you must understand how the parser will understand and translate what you write, it sounds like Zig will always know your intentions and maximize your code, it sounds too good to be true

pron 6y ago
If Zig were a high-level language it wouldn't have been so impressive. There are plenty of simple high-level languages. But in low-level domains there is a lot of extra accidental complexity because you need to precisely define layout, control memory allocation and placement, and try to avoid, or at least control branches or dynamic dispatch. And you need to do all that in the worst-case, and you don't have a JIT. So far there have been two approaches -- C, which is linguistically simple but inexpressive and spectacularly unsafe, and C++/Ada/Rust, which is much safer and much more expressive but incredibly complex. Zig finds a new way, not through some magic, but through really exceptional and radical design.
- cjohansson 6y ago
  But low-level languages also get translated by a parser so I don't see the difference.. Maybe you mean that languages has less abstractions and because of this simplier translations? Think I need to try Zig out to get a grip on it..
  - pron 6y ago
    I mean that in low-level languages the name of the game is how to work with low-level details, and Zig's design makes it exceptionally pleasant as it uses the same language for those details as it does for the logic. There is no magic here, just very clever and careful design.