When looking at the new programming languages, sometimes i feel like i'm alone in the wilderness in advocating for verbosity and the value of longer and clearer code.
I've never understood the desire to find shorter and shorter ways of expressing code. In fact one of the things i always try to hammer home when helping people learn to be better coders is that it's better to write 10 lines of understandable code than 2 lines of perfect concise incomprehensible hacks. But perl seems to have mainstreamed this obfucation-contest flavored coding style..
here's a blog post from a site i generally enjoy (
http://secretgeek.net/ruby_sugar.asp), which i almost took as satire:
and then looking back at the ruby manual (
http://www.ruby-doc....4/syntax.html#assign):
when i read stuff like this in a language i know that i'm on a different wavelength from the language/syntax designers and move on to another language..
what's the goal here fellas?
you dont want to write:
foo=1;
bar=2;
oy vey talk about lazy. upgrade from your 10mb hard drive and stop worrying about using a few extra bytes of source code. maybe it's time for me to dig up my plans on a language whose primary design principle was clarity and readability and unambiguity..
this attraction to having "cool" ways of writing compound complex statements just boggles my mind.
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