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> HETERO-iconicity, boilerplate, structure... helps the new hires find their bearings in the codebase. But only in theory. The shit that I keep seeing of incom
by classified 2y ago
> HETERO-iconicity, boilerplate, structure... helps the new hires find their bearings in the codebase.
But only in theory. The shit that I keep seeing of incomprehensible spaghetti code in C and C++ disproves that theory on a daily basis.
- iLemming 2y agoYup. I've seen programmers whose first language was Clojure. Later, when they tried to get into Java or Typescript, their first reaction was almost always, "WTF is all this shit? How do people even look at this stuff all day long? How do you make sense here, why everything feels so needlessly tangled?"
- classified 2y agoLanguages enforcing a questionable structure or boatloads of boilerplate are one thing, but it's also that writing comprehensible code is a skill in and of itself. If you don't have that (yet), no language on earth is going to save you.
- iLemming 2y agoTrue. Writing beautiful code that is easy to reason about is a skill. Just like writing prose, it comes with experience. One can try multiple programming languages and still suck at it; It is not language-dependent art. I've seen horrible code in languages I know well, and I've seen beautiful code in PLs I have no idea how to write idiomatic structures in.