4 ms·
What is important is not really size but consistency and "self-containment" - are the language constructs and semantics (including the std library) semantically
by margorczynski 4y ago
What is important is not really size but consistency and "self-containment" - are the language constructs and semantics (including the std library) semantically and logically consistent with one another.
If that's not the case it gets much harder to get your head around how it all works as you cannot effectively apply some simple pattern to all the stuff you see and you need to juggle different ways of thinking when doing basic stuff. And this propagates even further and harder to other libraries.
- voidhorse 4y agoThere's also the problem of determining how semantics and comprehensibility of the whole are affected by the interaction of parts. Adding new features to a language is always costly because you not only have to deal with the new semantics of the new feature, but with the emergent semantics of how that feature interacts with the existing feature set. The cost of adding some new semantic and syntax is not just N, but N*M, where M is the subset of existing features that the new feature may interact with in some meaningful way. For example, if you add support for declaring a constant (separate from a variable) this is not just the addition of some new, isolated meaning, but introduces semantic difference—the programmer now needs to reason about variables as opposed to constants and also needs to discern this difference in all scopes in which the distinction is valid...