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Some languages are designed for professionals to comprehend easily at a glance: these languages use symbols instead of words, use brackets effectively and don't

by PLejeck 15y ago

Some languages are designed for professionals to comprehend easily at a glance: these languages use symbols instead of words, use brackets effectively and don't rely too much on whitespace. Other languages are designed to be easy for anyone: these languages use English as inspiration, using whitespace instead of brackets. CoffeeScript has a place, but not in production. It belongs in the classroom, to help those wanting to learn an easy language to program in. Ruby, I believe, belongs there as well. Languages like C, C++, PHP, JS, etc. are all designed for production. They may not be pretty to look at, but they're easy to comprehend at a glance. It's all a question of what learning curve you're aiming for: the learners curve or the advanced curve. TL;DR - tradeoffs: learn them.

tjholowaychuk 15y ago
++ exactly, no one gives a shit how clever or cute your code is, it should be easy to read, all the "noise" people speak of make this simpler. In fact I think that if you have a difficult time parsing it with LL it's most likely a crummy grammar, if parser has ambiguities reading it wont be much fun to read either
jnbiche 15y ago
Taking this argument to its logical conclusion, Perl would be the ultimate language for 'professionals' to use, since it's full of shorthand symbols. And it's true -- if you wrote the code, Perl is very easy to scan. If you didn't write the code, however, Perl is not always so easy to scan. Which is exactly the point of Ruby, Python, Coffeescript, and other similar languages. I´ve heard it said that on average, only 20% of programming is writing original code, and the rest is maintaining other people's code. For this reason, Ruby, Python, and Coffeescript are much easier to maintain for most people than JS, C, Perl, PHP, etc. Personally, I know both JS and Coffeescript well, and have actually done much more work in JS over the years, but the first thing I do now when I get a third-party Javascript program is convert it to Coffeescript (using js2coffee). I can read and understand Coffeescript about twice as fast as I can Javascript, even though I started working with Javascript in 1998.
- PLejeck 15y ago
  There's this thing, it's called "balance"

by PLejeck 15y ago

tjholowaychuk 15y ago

++ exactly, no one gives a shit how clever or cute your code is, it should be easy to read, all the "noise" people speak of make this simpler. In fact I think that if you have a difficult time parsing it with LL it's most likely a crummy grammar, if parser has ambiguities reading it wont be much fun to read either

jnbiche 15y ago

Taking this argument to its logical conclusion, Perl would be the ultimate language for 'professionals' to use, since it's full of shorthand symbols. And it's true -- if you wrote the code, Perl is very easy to scan. If you didn't write the code, however, Perl is not always so easy to scan. Which is exactly the point of Ruby, Python, Coffeescript, and other similar languages. I´ve heard it said that on average, only 20% of programming is writing original code, and the rest is maintaining other people's code. For this reason, Ruby, Python, and Coffeescript are much easier to maintain for most people than JS, C, Perl, PHP, etc. Personally, I know both JS and Coffeescript well, and have actually done much more work in JS over the years, but the first thing I do now when I get a third-party Javascript program is convert it to Coffeescript (using js2coffee). I can read and understand Coffeescript about twice as fast as I can Javascript, even though I started working with Javascript in 1998.

PLejeck 15y ago
There's this thing, it's called "balance"