4 ms·

This really resonates with me. I remember when I started programming (at like 10 or so), my dad tried to teach me Smalltalk. Smalltalk is a great language, but

This really resonates with me. I remember when I started programming (at like 10 or so), my dad tried to teach me Smalltalk. Smalltalk is a great language, but there were just too many concepts and abstractions happening on each line of code. To understand even basic code required understanding messages, objects, classes, blocks, etc. Maybe to an 18 year old that would have been ok, but for my 10 year old brain it was too much. A few months later though, I started with QBASIC. BASIC of course gets an awful rap, but it was so much more intuitive for me at the time. I started out with just global variables and GOTO's everywhere. Over time, I worked up to loops, and subroutines, etc. etc. However, the simplicity of "program runs one line at a time, each line does something obvious" was incredibly important to beginner-me. Even once I moved to C, when I was an amateur I still had a tendency towards one line per thing happening. I really hated code like while(i++ < 10) { doSomethingWith(i); } (Actually, I still do). As I got more sophisticated in my 20s, I started packing a lot more ideas into a single line. If I'm being perfectly honest, I think some of it was just showing off. You certainly look clever if you can put 3 list comprehensions on one line or use some of the more advanced collections apis. However, besides understandability, I found that style of code had two really big problems: 1) It's a lot harder to debug. Either you can't get a breakpoint in the precise place you want, or you can't insert a print statement easily into a complex expression, or iteration variables become implicit and you lose context. 2) It's hard to add error handling to that type of code. When a lot of things happen in a complex expression, you're depending on the entire expression working. Luckily I've grown out of that phase, although ironically now my much more mature code looks a lot like the very simplistic code I wrote as a teenager.

jstimpfle 4y ago
3) It's also harder to edit with an editor (like vim), and (IMO) harder to read. I never even do "int x, y = 3;". I always put each variable declaration on its own line.
- mafuy 4y ago
  That avoids bugs and misunderstandings, too. You know this, but for those unaware, in the previous example, x is not initialized to 3. Similarly, in "int* p1, p2;", p2 is an int, not an int*. Easy to misread.

jstimpfle 4y ago

3) It's also harder to edit with an editor (like vim), and (IMO) harder to read. I never even do "int x, y = 3;". I always put each variable declaration on its own line.

mafuy 4y ago
That avoids bugs and misunderstandings, too. You know this, but for those unaware, in the previous example, x is not initialized to 3. Similarly, in "int* p1, p2;", p2 is an int, not an int*. Easy to misread.