2 ms·
Is readability to people who don't know the first thing about F# at all relevant? If that's the most important metric then we should write out all our programs
by abraininavat 14y ago
Is readability to people who don't know the first thing about F# at all relevant? If that's the most important metric then we should write out all our programs in plain English.
Readability to F# programmers is what matters, along with a host of other concerns, such as terseness.
- kvb 14y agoActually, I think there's some merit to writing code that is readable to outsiders, for several reasons. First of all, with a not-quite-mainstream language like F#, you're more likely to have team members joining your projects who are lacking the relevant in-language expertise. Making code more readable for them without significantly harming readability for an expert seems like a fine tradeoff. Secondly, one benefit to F# is that the code can read almost like pseudocode, which opens up the possibility of having domain experts (that is, non-programmers) review code, in which case the same tradeoff also makes sense (see e.g. Jane St. Capital, where traders review some/most of their OCaml code).