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Which is why I enjoy buying things at Costco. They usually have one widget of a particular type. And historically for me at least, they seem to be proficient

Which is why I enjoy buying things at Costco. They usually have one widget of a particular type. And historically for me at least, they seem to be proficient at choosing good widgets. Thus, my only choice is whether I want it or not, not then another choice of which one do I want.

galaxyLogic 4y ago
That is also the reason I dislike languages like Perl and Groovy. They have too many ways of doing the same thing. Web-design is another good example. There are typically so many ways of accomplishing something, that I actually don't spend much time thinking about it. But then later I found I could have done simpler and better with another approach.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  In terms of language design, absolutely. Giving "free" choices to users just makes it more confusing. It's better to have one way of doing things than three that are kinda like the same but don't offer many advantages. Optional for optional's sake doesn't help.
- leobg 4y ago
  So what would you say then is “the Costco of programming languages”?
  - valbaca 4y ago
    I would say Go. I think when coding the only "decisions" to be made were whether to make things public or not, whether to use pointer receivers or not (even that wasn't usually a decision), and how to do error handling (no language is going to do that for you). Go was at version 1.5 (2015) when my copy of The Go Programming language was release and there has been exactly ONE major language feature: Generics. Here's from my Go notes on releases: Releases: https://go.dev/doc/devel/release https://go.dev/doc/devel/release (Since 1.5, my book's version) 1.9: type aliases, type T1 = T2 (Since 1.12, when I last learned Go) 1.13: number literals improved, godoc removed from core: go get golang.org/x/tools/cmd/godoc godoc 1.14: overlapping interfaces, https://tinyurl.com/2fcyrnqm https://tinyurl.com/2fcyrnqm 1.17: slice to array conv https://tinyurl.com/y3xvpwud https://tinyurl.com/y3xvpwud 1.18: GENERICS

galaxyLogic 4y ago

That is also the reason I dislike languages like Perl and Groovy. They have too many ways of doing the same thing. Web-design is another good example. There are typically so many ways of accomplishing something, that I actually don't spend much time thinking about it. But then later I found I could have done simpler and better with another approach.

raverbashing 4y ago
In terms of language design, absolutely. Giving "free" choices to users just makes it more confusing. It's better to have one way of doing things than three that are kinda like the same but don't offer many advantages. Optional for optional's sake doesn't help.
leobg 4y ago
So what would you say then is “the Costco of programming languages”?
- valbaca 4y ago
  I would say Go. I think when coding the only "decisions" to be made were whether to make things public or not, whether to use pointer receivers or not (even that wasn't usually a decision), and how to do error handling (no language is going to do that for you). Go was at version 1.5 (2015) when my copy of The Go Programming language was release and there has been exactly ONE major language feature: Generics. Here's from my Go notes on releases: Releases: https://go.dev/doc/devel/release https://go.dev/doc/devel/release (Since 1.5, my book's version) 1.9: type aliases, type T1 = T2 (Since 1.12, when I last learned Go) 1.13: number literals improved, godoc removed from core: go get golang.org/x/tools/cmd/godoc godoc 1.14: overlapping interfaces, https://tinyurl.com/2fcyrnqm https://tinyurl.com/2fcyrnqm 1.17: slice to array conv https://tinyurl.com/y3xvpwud https://tinyurl.com/y3xvpwud 1.18: GENERICS