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On Cosmetics vs. Intrinsics in Programming
- recursivedoubts 4y agoA good article. I will take the other side of the argument (shocking, I know) and claim that cosmetics are important too, after all: “it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances." Developers have to read code and the cosmetics matter here. hyperscript has "async transparency" (https://hyperscript.org/docs/#async https://hyperscript.org/docs/#async) baked into the language, so script writers don't have to deal with promises explicitly. That's a cosmetic decision, the underlying intrinsic concurrency model is the same as JavaScript, that I chose because I didn't like the aesthetics of script writers needing to worry about that level of detail. It was sort of a "looks-right driven development" approach. Now, aesthetics are notoriously subjective and context sensitive, which makes it an impossible problem to "solve" in general, but we shouldn't dismiss it because of that. The fact that we argue so much about cosmetics is a strong argument in favor of its importance, even if it has a large subjective component.
- drewcoo 4y ago“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances." - Oscar Wilde https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2868-it-is-only-shallow-people-who-do-not-judge-by https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2868-it-is-only-shallow-peo... > The fact that we argue so much about cosmetics is a strong argument in favor of its importance, even if it has a large subjective component. No. It's a sign that the issue can't be clearly decided. And it's simple enough that everyone can have an opinion.
- recursivedoubts 4y agoAll of these things can be true.