4 ms·

It's interesting how different languages resonate so differently with each of us. I have tried a bunch of languages, and got pretty deep into ruby at one point

It's interesting how different languages resonate so differently with each of us. I have tried a bunch of languages, and got pretty deep into ruby at one point in time when rails was the main web framework i was using. However ruby is probably my least favorite language. Most of the features which actually make ruby unique are exactly the one that turned me away and toward something like F# when i want funtional goodness, C++ when i feel adventurous and scheme/racket when i want dynamic language fix. > Ruby is probably the most expressive programming language on Earth I wonder if there is a generally accepted quantifiable definition of programming language expressiveness. Here the author seems to equate it to closeness to natural languages. In my experience, ruby code is easy to write, but hard to follow without being familiar with the code base and it's idom. A lot of the information required to understand it is passed through implicit context.

philomath_mn 3y ago
> I wonder if there is a generally accepted quantifiable definition of programming language expressiveness In my opinion, expressiveness is used as the catchall, je ne sais quoi whenever someone likes a language and needs another bullet point to put in the "Pros" column.
- jjgreen 3y ago
  It has a certain je ne sais quoi but I don't know what it is.
- Spivak 3y ago
  I don't think that tracks because the reason people like Go is due to it's lack of expressiveness. It feels like expressiveness is the quality of a language to allow the programmer to change the behavior of the language constructs themselves. Python __getitem__ would be a good example allowing the programmer to control [].
haolez 3y ago
On the other hand, I find it extremely difficult to follow C# code. It's a lot of type gymnastics and dependency injection noise that makes it hard to understand where's the actual business logic.
- soulbadguy 3y ago
  Agree. However i think this is mainly an artifact of API/framework designed in the 2000 and 2010 with over-enginered and over used designed patterns from the GOF. Both java and C# have their root deep in enterprise land were those are still sadly too common. Modern framework are a bit better.
  - haolez 3y ago
    And type gymnastics seem worth it on something like F#, but on C#, it feels a lot like bureaucracy with not a lot of benefit.
- replwoacause 3y ago
  I dislike C#. Too much ceremony for me. I want type safety without a ton of boilerplate. Is there any compiled language that offers this? Or languages built for the web? Go maybe? Not interested in a whitespace sensitive language though.
  - neonsunset 3y ago
    What kind of boilerplate are you seeing? If it's an old project, that's a given but the culture is changing and community is slowly accepting terseness and performance as key factors to consider when writing new code.
  - soulbadguy 3y ago
    I would have say F#, but it's white space sensitive, and sadly pretty much a dead language by now. Pretty much all the new-ish language have less boiler plate than C#/Java. Kotlin and swift are somewhat good.
  - lmm 3y ago
    > I dislike C#. Too much ceremony for me. I want type safety without a ton of boilerplate. Is there any compiled language that offers this? Or languages built for the web? Scala might be what you're looking for. (Or Haskell, but that's a bigger leap). You can write code that looks like Python/Ruby (some libraries are quite symbol-heavy, but you don't have to use them; check out lihaoyi's libraries for some Python-inspired simple interfaces), but everything's fully typed. And it has an excellent JavaScript backend that integrates with typescript/definitelytyped for using web libraries.
uticus 3y ago
> I wonder if there is a generally accepted quantifiable definition of programming language expressiveness. If there is such a definition it would not fit into these sorts of conversations. I love Ruby but every time I see someone mention Ruby "expressiveness" it is never mentioned as a subjective fact like syntax feature count. Instead it is always closely tied to emotional feeling, assumptions, and intuition. "Ruby's expressiveness means it just gets out of the way and lets me code." I've probably said that myself a hundred times. OTOH it is great for DSLs and metaprogramming, gives a taste of what the LISPers have always had. Maybe that is a good definition of "expressive". [edit: added thought about DSLs]
davidw 3y ago
> It's interesting how different languages resonate so differently with each of us Because programming languages are, at the end of the day, for communicating with other people trying to make the computer do things. And people have different styles, ideas and preferences. The computer doesn't care; it just wants some binary code to execute.
jrumbut 3y ago
> A lot of the information required to understand it is passed through implicit context. This is the counterintuitive genius of Ruby/Rails. Ruby projects need an idiom and Rails gives you a good one. If a team knows Rails and its conventions they are a good ways toward developing a shared understanding of how to build (certain kinds of) software. You become acutely aware that writing code is an act of communication. Other languages, ones with certain kinds of type systems and where there is more explicitness, can create an illusion that coders don't need to do the work to develop a shared mental model of the problem and how to solve it. As long as it compiles, everything's OK. But I think there is always information being passed through implicit context and if it isn't handled correctly then quality will suffer, one way or another.
- soulbadguy 3y ago
  > Ruby projects need an idiom and Rails gives you a good one. I can't say i agree. Projects need idiom reflecting the particulars of said project. Rails as a framework, shouldn't impose idioms to the whole project. But more importantly from my view is that implicitness is not a requirement to any of the idiom that rails imposes. > Other languages, ones with certain kinds of type systems and where there is more explicitness, can create an illusion that coders don't need to do the work to develop a shared mental model of the problem and how to solve it. Here again, i don't agree. I would be surprise to find any language designer trying to replace the need of a shared mental model. IMO, the point of a type system and explicitness is to make the sharing of the mental model easier. The type system make the space of possible software smaller and therefore eaiser to grasp. And explicitness reduce the need to keep things in one's head.
  - the_other 3y ago
    I don't think the GP was centring their comment on language creators, but on teams building software using a given language. I feel that some teams don't spend enough time discussing the mental model required to contribute well to their codebase. I feel that type systems can hide this, and that people creating the types for a project forget to make a coherent, understandable model (either this, or I'm too junior with my typing and don't yet have the skill to infer a model from the visible types). I also think this model-building work has two related aspects: 1. it's hard to do and hard to describe 2. one of the best ways, in my opinion, is to build comfortable abstractions that reinforce the model.. but that's even harder to do. It's easier to "enforce" than it is to "educate"; types and patterns get used to enforce structure first, rather than to explain the structure. To be honest, I only have a light grasp on this myself... I've just seen a few cases where a codebases chosen abstractions and patterns of abstractions help to reinforce a structure, but don't help to explain anything about that structure or the problem it attempts to solve
rewgs 3y ago
> I wonder if there is a generally accepted quantifiable definition of programming language expressiveness. I doubt it, considering "expressive" tends to only ever describe something that's subjective.
gtf21 3y ago
> I wonder if there is a generally accepted quantifiable definition of programming language expressiveness. Here the author seems to equate it to closeness to natural languages. I was going to make a similar comment -- it seems there might not be well agreed definitions of "expressiveness" here. I write most of my own projects in Haskell, precisely because I find Haskell to be extremely expressive, but I mean something different to "reads like English" (for which I think AppleScript is the closest example I can think of): to me, the expressiveness of the language is "how accurately can I describe my problem domain to the computer in a way that lets me naturally reason about it in code". I think this is mostly a function of the type system, not the particular syntax (e.g. allowing "?" in a method). I am really interested in what other people consider "expressiveness" to mean, however.

philomath_mn 3y ago

> I wonder if there is a generally accepted quantifiable definition of programming language expressiveness In my opinion, expressiveness is used as the catchall, je ne sais quoi whenever someone likes a language and needs another bullet point to put in the "Pros" column.

jjgreen 3y ago
It has a certain je ne sais quoi but I don't know what it is.
Spivak 3y ago
I don't think that tracks because the reason people like Go is due to it's lack of expressiveness. It feels like expressiveness is the quality of a language to allow the programmer to change the behavior of the language constructs themselves. Python __getitem__ would be a good example allowing the programmer to control [].

haolez 3y ago

On the other hand, I find it extremely difficult to follow C# code. It's a lot of type gymnastics and dependency injection noise that makes it hard to understand where's the actual business logic.

soulbadguy 3y ago
Agree. However i think this is mainly an artifact of API/framework designed in the 2000 and 2010 with over-enginered and over used designed patterns from the GOF. Both java and C# have their root deep in enterprise land were those are still sadly too common. Modern framework are a bit better.
- haolez 3y ago
  And type gymnastics seem worth it on something like F#, but on C#, it feels a lot like bureaucracy with not a lot of benefit.
replwoacause 3y ago
I dislike C#. Too much ceremony for me. I want type safety without a ton of boilerplate. Is there any compiled language that offers this? Or languages built for the web? Go maybe? Not interested in a whitespace sensitive language though.
- neonsunset 3y ago
  What kind of boilerplate are you seeing? If it's an old project, that's a given but the culture is changing and community is slowly accepting terseness and performance as key factors to consider when writing new code.
- soulbadguy 3y ago
  I would have say F#, but it's white space sensitive, and sadly pretty much a dead language by now. Pretty much all the new-ish language have less boiler plate than C#/Java. Kotlin and swift are somewhat good.
- lmm 3y ago
  > I dislike C#. Too much ceremony for me. I want type safety without a ton of boilerplate. Is there any compiled language that offers this? Or languages built for the web? Scala might be what you're looking for. (Or Haskell, but that's a bigger leap). You can write code that looks like Python/Ruby (some libraries are quite symbol-heavy, but you don't have to use them; check out lihaoyi's libraries for some Python-inspired simple interfaces), but everything's fully typed. And it has an excellent JavaScript backend that integrates with typescript/definitelytyped for using web libraries.

uticus 3y ago

> I wonder if there is a generally accepted quantifiable definition of programming language expressiveness. If there is such a definition it would not fit into these sorts of conversations. I love Ruby but every time I see someone mention Ruby "expressiveness" it is never mentioned as a subjective fact like syntax feature count. Instead it is always closely tied to emotional feeling, assumptions, and intuition. "Ruby's expressiveness means it just gets out of the way and lets me code." I've probably said that myself a hundred times. OTOH it is great for DSLs and metaprogramming, gives a taste of what the LISPers have always had. Maybe that is a good definition of "expressive". [edit: added thought about DSLs]

davidw 3y ago

> It's interesting how different languages resonate so differently with each of us Because programming languages are, at the end of the day, for communicating with other people trying to make the computer do things. And people have different styles, ideas and preferences. The computer doesn't care; it just wants some binary code to execute.

jrumbut 3y ago

> A lot of the information required to understand it is passed through implicit context. This is the counterintuitive genius of Ruby/Rails. Ruby projects need an idiom and Rails gives you a good one. If a team knows Rails and its conventions they are a good ways toward developing a shared understanding of how to build (certain kinds of) software. You become acutely aware that writing code is an act of communication. Other languages, ones with certain kinds of type systems and where there is more explicitness, can create an illusion that coders don't need to do the work to develop a shared mental model of the problem and how to solve it. As long as it compiles, everything's OK. But I think there is always information being passed through implicit context and if it isn't handled correctly then quality will suffer, one way or another.

soulbadguy 3y ago
> Ruby projects need an idiom and Rails gives you a good one. I can't say i agree. Projects need idiom reflecting the particulars of said project. Rails as a framework, shouldn't impose idioms to the whole project. But more importantly from my view is that implicitness is not a requirement to any of the idiom that rails imposes. > Other languages, ones with certain kinds of type systems and where there is more explicitness, can create an illusion that coders don't need to do the work to develop a shared mental model of the problem and how to solve it. Here again, i don't agree. I would be surprise to find any language designer trying to replace the need of a shared mental model. IMO, the point of a type system and explicitness is to make the sharing of the mental model easier. The type system make the space of possible software smaller and therefore eaiser to grasp. And explicitness reduce the need to keep things in one's head.
- the_other 3y ago
  I don't think the GP was centring their comment on language creators, but on teams building software using a given language. I feel that some teams don't spend enough time discussing the mental model required to contribute well to their codebase. I feel that type systems can hide this, and that people creating the types for a project forget to make a coherent, understandable model (either this, or I'm too junior with my typing and don't yet have the skill to infer a model from the visible types). I also think this model-building work has two related aspects: 1. it's hard to do and hard to describe 2. one of the best ways, in my opinion, is to build comfortable abstractions that reinforce the model.. but that's even harder to do. It's easier to "enforce" than it is to "educate"; types and patterns get used to enforce structure first, rather than to explain the structure. To be honest, I only have a light grasp on this myself... I've just seen a few cases where a codebases chosen abstractions and patterns of abstractions help to reinforce a structure, but don't help to explain anything about that structure or the problem it attempts to solve

rewgs 3y ago

> I wonder if there is a generally accepted quantifiable definition of programming language expressiveness. I doubt it, considering "expressive" tends to only ever describe something that's subjective.

gtf21 3y ago

> I wonder if there is a generally accepted quantifiable definition of programming language expressiveness. Here the author seems to equate it to closeness to natural languages. I was going to make a similar comment -- it seems there might not be well agreed definitions of "expressiveness" here. I write most of my own projects in Haskell, precisely because I find Haskell to be extremely expressive, but I mean something different to "reads like English" (for which I think AppleScript is the closest example I can think of): to me, the expressiveness of the language is "how accurately can I describe my problem domain to the computer in a way that lets me naturally reason about it in code". I think this is mostly a function of the type system, not the particular syntax (e.g. allowing "?" in a method). I am really interested in what other people consider "expressiveness" to mean, however.