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I've always wondered what people mean when they say Lisp & co are hard to read. I'd think having great powers of abstraction would produce code that reads more
by jadyoyster 13y ago
I've always wondered what people mean when they say Lisp & co are hard to read. I'd think having great powers of abstraction would produce code that reads more easily.
Of course you have to figure out what the abstractions do, but is that really worse than having to reverse engineer low-level non-abstractions on the fly even if they're in a "human readable" language?
- skybrian 13y agoThis depends on the kind of abstraction. The closer programming is to math, the less likely it is that anyone other than mathematicians can read it, because they're not familiar with the abstractions you're using and they're hard to learn. (And even simple mathematical abstractions are hard because there's no domain-specific content to them; it just looks like abstract nonsense.) It's also possible to use abstraction to get closer to how your customers think, but only if you use abstractions that they already know from the target domain.