Very strange article cause I can’t find these proposals in tc39 repo
https://github.com/tc39/proposals
Asd
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garrison
garrison
A lot of this is just a matter of what you’re used to, which is why it’s good that pattern matching and pipes and so on are propagating to other languages. It eases adoption for Elixir because people are already familiar with the style. This is actually how I started writing Elixir: I had become comfortable with a functional/immutable style of programming in languages like JS and Python first, so when I heard there was a whole language like that I was open to the idea.
Libraries like immutable.js probably drive a good chunk of Elixir adoption.
lol I’m not sure if I would describe SQL as “readable” either. It comes from the era of “what if we made programming languages look like English” and that really didn’t work out. What is interesting is that SQL has maintained such relevance when others (e.g. COBOL) have not.
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Schultzer
Lol, I was not arguing for anything to be more readable than the other. Quite the opposite. It was a jab at the whole notion around readability in general.
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garrison
Well I do think a lot of it is just experience/comfort (like I said), but I also definitely think “readability” does exist. C is definitely more readable than x86 assembly. I don’t think that’s just because I’m more comfortable with C syntax. Some constructs are legitimately hard to understand; you know, “GOTO considered harmful” and all that.
Actually if anything I think I would be comfortable asserting that pattern matching is a bit more readable than if/elseif block spam in a language with C syntax. I rarely use if in Elixir.
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Schultzer
I think you said it best yourself: it depends, and it depends especially on the problem you’re trying to solve, at times assembly is by far the better choice then C in readability when you work at that level of performance.
That’s exactly why I dread when anyone brings up readability as it is mostly used as a knee jerk reaction from developers that lacks maturity to admit their own inabilities.
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garrison
Oh yeah, I guess it’s just a matter of interpretation. I would think of that as “sacrificing” readability for performance by dropping to assembly, but I do see the other perspective there. Sometimes the choice is between using “ugly” tricks in a high-level language or doing it the right way in a low-level language.
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tfwright
I have to strongly disagree here. Of course readability increases with familiarity but that doesn’t mean there isn’t significant variation in baselines. The difference is quite clear between languages that value clean, communicative apis and those that don’t, just as there is between frameworks, and code bases.
And I have had the opposite experience, of developers shutting their ears to criticism around readability/clarity because in their view only “objective” metrics like performance, or LOC, etc, matter when assessing code quality.
edit Also should say I think the point that languages having their own domains makes direct comparisons problematic, is absolutely valid, but even, or rather especially those cases illustrate the power of readability. Like many newcomers to Elixir I started with little to no knowledge of parallel computing, and although of course this made the OTP stuff more opaque than, say, the Enum module, the care put into expressing the problem the clear consistent way made it a lot easier to gain that familiarity.
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Schultzer
I don’t think we’re disagreeing at all, my point with c vs assembly was to illustrate readability in a sense where you can read exactly how the code would be executed on a specific machine, C abstract that to a degree where you can write code more generally regardless of the architecture. And for some cases that comes with a performance penalty. But again all of this is beside the point and my opinion about knee jerk reactions as readability, since it all depends which to me then makes it a weak argument in general.
Case in point my own post about SQL above, which was made with tongue in cheek and as a jab to it all.
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tfwright
Not sure I am following, but from what I can tell we do disagree that there is any particular problem with “yelling” about readability, vs “yelling” about anything else, like performance or what have you. “it depends” does not make it a weak argument, because when it comes to assessment everything depends on goals, constraints and other things, so we should avoid invoking some sort of mythical purely objective POV that makes some arguments strong or weak in advance without some sort of consideration.
In an effort to be more on topic I do think it would be a good think if Elixir had more influence on other languages for precisely this reason, because it shows a lot more attention to the aesthetics of code. I am happy to see that coming through in the discussions around the development of the typing system. This seems to me to be a big part of the influence of Ruby. Matz, and the community generally, famously prized “developer happiness” and I think it’s sort of a shame this somewhat became bogged down in a “performance vs productivity” debate for some reason (coughDHHcoughcough). I have no desire to transform into an emotionless robot when I am writing code and I really wish “this code makes me sad when I read it” would at least be given some of the weight in reviews as “this code is not performant“ when it’s really not always true that the latter is somehow automatically more important. In my experience a lot of disagreements around code quality are hampered by pretensions of objectivity when the reality is more “this is just the way I like to do it“
So yeah let’s not yell (“average” developers are certainly not the only ones guilty of this) but let’s consider arguments even when they appear to be just a matter of opinion. “Is this enough abstraction” is fundamentally a subjective question and I’m tempted to say it’s the most generalized form of any assessment of software quality
3