3 ms·

I once read a HN comment the made an analogy to reading levels in a newspaper or other natural language. I found this very apt. If you have a rich vocabulary a

I once read a HN comment the made an analogy to reading levels in a newspaper or other natural language. I found this very apt. If you have a rich vocabulary and so does your audience, you can explain an idea succinctly. Imagine a chain of function compositions in one line, very declarative. You grasp it near immediately or else its very difficult. If you don't, you use simpler words and need more of them. Imagine a few nested for loops in something like Go that you need to execute in your head to realize what's going on, but anyone can figure it out given a little time. People frequently talk past each other on this topic. It can be very frustrating.

Zababa 5y ago
There's something I always thought about but haven't been able to express clearly, and that's about "shared mental models". For example, with Go, the standard library is huge, people tend to not use many libraries, especially ones that change the language, and most people write code the same way. That means that for any two people writing Go code, they share a big part of their mental model about what code should be. That makes it "boring" when one reads the other. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you could put Scala. There are already a few ways to use Scala as a language: Java with better types, OO all the way, functional all the way. And then there are ecosystems. Zio, cats, Akka. All of that means that for two people writing Scala code, the shared mental model is going to be small unless they use it the exact same way. You can infer some things from that. Languages with big standard libraries that are somewhat good will allow people to share a bigger part of their mental model compared to languages with bad standard libraries (people will create replacements) or languages with very small standard libraries. Languages with a lot of features that are actually used will have a low amount of shared mental models, but also languages with not many features as people will reimplement things themselves.

Zababa 5y ago

There's something I always thought about but haven't been able to express clearly, and that's about "shared mental models". For example, with Go, the standard library is huge, people tend to not use many libraries, especially ones that change the language, and most people write code the same way. That means that for any two people writing Go code, they share a big part of their mental model about what code should be. That makes it "boring" when one reads the other. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you could put Scala. There are already a few ways to use Scala as a language: Java with better types, OO all the way, functional all the way. And then there are ecosystems. Zio, cats, Akka. All of that means that for two people writing Scala code, the shared mental model is going to be small unless they use it the exact same way. You can infer some things from that. Languages with big standard libraries that are somewhat good will allow people to share a bigger part of their mental model compared to languages with bad standard libraries (people will create replacements) or languages with very small standard libraries. Languages with a lot of features that are actually used will have a low amount of shared mental models, but also languages with not many features as people will reimplement things themselves.