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The more I think about it the more I believe concision is overrated and borderline dangerous. Shaving a few keystroke today very often means great troubl

by gbog 14y ago

The more I think about it the more I believe concision is overrated and borderline dangerous. Shaving a few keystroke today very often means great troubles later. I used to like those hello world concision contests, but in fact who cares? Who writes a single hello world code? What we need is a language solving the real problems met in most codebase, and I'd say the biggest fish here is the dependencies mess.

dasil003 14y ago
I mean concise compared to Java. The reason is because I want to primarily use vim and not need an IDE.
anko 14y ago
If you spend your day typing the same stuff for a simple program, or you need an IDE to be happy, that is a language failing in my opinion. The less bloated the core syntax is, the clearer your ideas are which makes your code easier to read. I'm not saying methods should be arithmetic symbols - I think short words with not much syntax around them makes for more readable code. ruby tends to read like pseudo-code, which is a great way to express the code idea of your algorithm when you're thinking about it, and when you're reading it back later.
- gbog 14y ago
  Fair enough, but then what we want is readability, which is related but not equivalent to conciseness. I often have discussions with colleagues about different coding idioms in Python, and I hear often "this one is better because it is less typing". I don't think this is very valid. If everything is equal, then sure, go for less typing. But using locals() instead of explicit arguments when calling a template rendering because "it is less typing" seems not strong enough an argument to me.
  - anko 14y ago
    I totally agree, and if people think something is better because it's shorter, they are missing the point. But if all other things are equal (and they rarely are), I think shorter is better.

by gbog 14y ago

dasil003 14y ago

I mean concise compared to Java. The reason is because I want to primarily use vim and not need an IDE.

anko 14y ago

If you spend your day typing the same stuff for a simple program, or you need an IDE to be happy, that is a language failing in my opinion. The less bloated the core syntax is, the clearer your ideas are which makes your code easier to read. I'm not saying methods should be arithmetic symbols - I think short words with not much syntax around them makes for more readable code. ruby tends to read like pseudo-code, which is a great way to express the code idea of your algorithm when you're thinking about it, and when you're reading it back later.

gbog 14y ago
Fair enough, but then what we want is readability, which is related but not equivalent to conciseness. I often have discussions with colleagues about different coding idioms in Python, and I hear often "this one is better because it is less typing". I don't think this is very valid. If everything is equal, then sure, go for less typing. But using locals() instead of explicit arguments when calling a template rendering because "it is less typing" seems not strong enough an argument to me.
- anko 14y ago
  I totally agree, and if people think something is better because it's shorter, they are missing the point. But if all other things are equal (and they rarely are), I think shorter is better.