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So what's your suggestion here? It sounds like this person feels more proficient, more on-the-ball, writing Go. So, you call them ignorant (incredibly ignoran

by tobz 12y ago

So what's your suggestion here? It sounds like this person feels more proficient, more on-the-ball, writing Go. So, you call them ignorant (incredibly ignorant, at that) because they're not using a language with exceptions or pattern matching, and they're wasting they're time on "C-style" error handling and... what? They're ignorant until they use something else? You're also drawing a weak conclusion here: if you use Go idomatically, which requires more lines on your screen for error handling, and a majority of programming errors are a result of the programmer not being able to keep a sufficient amount of program state in their head because of code not fitting neatly on the screen, then using Go leads to more bugs. Do you have anything that substantiates that?

lmm 12y ago
> So, you call them ignorant (incredibly ignorant, at that) because they're not using a language with exceptions or pattern matching, and they're wasting they're time on "C-style" error handling and... what? They're ignorant until they use something else? Honestly, yes, though I would try to phrase it more constructively. If you've only seen C-style languages, it's easy to be ignorant of the world out there; it's easy to try two or three languages and think you know what's going on, when in fact the languages you know all come from a very similar lineage. Like learning English, German and Dutch, and then assuming you know the general principles of human grammar. If you've tried a language pattern matching and higher kinded types, and found them to be not useful, then fair enough. But you owe it to yourself to try, and even if you end up not using the feature, understanding it will make you a better programmer. > Do you have anything that substantiates that? Over many years of research into what causes bugs, there's only one thing we've ever been able to correlate reliably with number of bugs: number of lines of code. Even across different languages, the correlation holds: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/185660/is-the-average-number-of-bugs-per-loc-the-same-for-different-programming-languag http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/185660/is-the... . So the only evidence-based way to reduce software errors is to reduce lines of code - something you can do by switching to a more expressive language.

by tobz 12y ago

lmm 12y ago

> So, you call them ignorant (incredibly ignorant, at that) because they're not using a language with exceptions or pattern matching, and they're wasting they're time on "C-style" error handling and... what? They're ignorant until they use something else? Honestly, yes, though I would try to phrase it more constructively. If you've only seen C-style languages, it's easy to be ignorant of the world out there; it's easy to try two or three languages and think you know what's going on, when in fact the languages you know all come from a very similar lineage. Like learning English, German and Dutch, and then assuming you know the general principles of human grammar. If you've tried a language pattern matching and higher kinded types, and found them to be not useful, then fair enough. But you owe it to yourself to try, and even if you end up not using the feature, understanding it will make you a better programmer. > Do you have anything that substantiates that? Over many years of research into what causes bugs, there's only one thing we've ever been able to correlate reliably with number of bugs: number of lines of code. Even across different languages, the correlation holds: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/185660/is-the-average-number-of-bugs-per-loc-the-same-for-different-programming-languag http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/185660/is-the... . So the only evidence-based way to reduce software errors is to reduce lines of code - something you can do by switching to a more expressive language.