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Why would anyone think that a verbose language is a good idea? Explicit? Sure. But verbose? There's no good reason for that, except that when Smalltalk was d

Why would anyone think that a verbose language is a good idea? Explicit? Sure. But verbose? There's no good reason for that, except that when Smalltalk was designed, we thought it was a good idea. We know better today.

goatlover 5y ago
It wasn't too long ago, some people were defending Objective C's verbose naming schemes. "We know better today" sounds more like a fashion statement than an objective one. Opinions on coding styles tend to change with the languages that become popular. Granted, I do prefer explicit short over verbose.
scroot 5y ago
> Why would anyone think that a verbose language is a good idea? What if you are a "sometimes" programmer -- you write some code, then come back to it months later. In many ways this was the intent behind the development of early personal computing. Verbosity is an advantage in these cases because in theory it becomes easier to discern what is going on without having to be immersed in the language, frameworks, and environment all the time.
- hota_mazi 5y ago
  This is not an argument in favor of verbosity, it's an argument in favor of static types and type inference. Keep the verbosity to a minimum while making the code easier to read, understand, and maintain.
  - igouy 5y ago
    They said “without having to be immersed in”.
igouy 5y ago
We sometimes think we know better. There is not an objective universal boundary between explicit and verbose. Some readers will need more, some can guess correctly with less.
xkriva11 5y ago
I never thouht of Smalltalk as being verbose. It has basically no boilerplate code, almost no syntax and good Smalltalk code is usually well factored. In Pharo, average method has 5 lines (median is 3) of 32 characters (median is 24). Usual method in Smalltalk, including its definition, is shorther than this sentence.
- igouy 5y ago
  > In Pharo, average method has… Do you mean in base Pharo, or do you mean in an enterprisey system built using Pharo?
  - xkriva11 5y ago
    These are the statistics from base Pharo. Enterprise systems will probably have, in average, longer methods because of longer domain-specific names and tests that are usually more descriptive.

goatlover 5y ago

It wasn't too long ago, some people were defending Objective C's verbose naming schemes. "We know better today" sounds more like a fashion statement than an objective one. Opinions on coding styles tend to change with the languages that become popular. Granted, I do prefer explicit short over verbose.

scroot 5y ago

> Why would anyone think that a verbose language is a good idea? What if you are a "sometimes" programmer -- you write some code, then come back to it months later. In many ways this was the intent behind the development of early personal computing. Verbosity is an advantage in these cases because in theory it becomes easier to discern what is going on without having to be immersed in the language, frameworks, and environment all the time.

hota_mazi 5y ago
This is not an argument in favor of verbosity, it's an argument in favor of static types and type inference. Keep the verbosity to a minimum while making the code easier to read, understand, and maintain.
- igouy 5y ago
  They said “without having to be immersed in”.

igouy 5y ago

We sometimes think we know better. There is not an objective universal boundary between explicit and verbose. Some readers will need more, some can guess correctly with less.

xkriva11 5y ago

I never thouht of Smalltalk as being verbose. It has basically no boilerplate code, almost no syntax and good Smalltalk code is usually well factored. In Pharo, average method has 5 lines (median is 3) of 32 characters (median is 24). Usual method in Smalltalk, including its definition, is shorther than this sentence.

igouy 5y ago
> In Pharo, average method has… Do you mean in base Pharo, or do you mean in an enterprisey system built using Pharo?
- xkriva11 5y ago
  These are the statistics from base Pharo. Enterprise systems will probably have, in average, longer methods because of longer domain-specific names and tests that are usually more descriptive.