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0 pointsdivan2y ago0 comments

Sure, it's always a tradeoff. Yet my pet peeve is that people rarely talk about the social aspects of the programming language. It's called "language" for a reason. We express our thoughts using this language ("I intend this code to do such and such"), and we expect other people to be able to understand what we intended, and we want to make sure that they understand exactly as we want them to.

I judge languages on their ability to collectively construct mental maps in the brains of the developers who work on the same project. If they all read the same code, will they be able to understand the task and intent of that code without additional explanations? How cognitively hard would it be?

Gottfried Liebnitz was obsessed with finding a Universal Language, which was exactly about this – making communication clear and lacking misunderstanding. I feel like Dart (and most other languages) approach is the opposite of that. Creating multiple ways to express the same intent is a sure go way to introduce misunderstanding and fracture the speakers of that language into dialects and groups. Go's, on the other hand, is really good at making this "reconstructing mental map" part a joy.

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doctor_eval2y ago

I don't know Dart at all, but I used Java from version 1.0, and watched as it morphed and morphed again - from for-loops, to collections with iterators, then "upwards" to list and map comprehensions, closures, function pointers. My younger colleagues were writing code I could barely understand; having left that world several years ago, I still find idiomatic modern Java difficult to mentally map to intent, as you put it. The feature set is undisciplined.

So I completely agree with you. I think it's unfortunate that some people appear to mistake simplicity of construction with simplicity of thought. Go's ingenious simplicity - its elegance - is a virtue. Unfortunately it also reflects what Dijkstra said: "Why has elegance found so little following? ... Elegance has the disadvantage if that's what it is that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it".

throw-the-towel2y ago

My experience with Go is quite the opposite. Python may be way slower to run, but it maps to my intent extremely well. In Go, every time you try to find an item in a slice, or convert a slice to a map for faster search, or whatever, one piece of intent turns into a whole paragraph of boilerplate or a completely ad-hoc helper function.

Reading Go feels like legalese.