Growing a Language, by Guy Steele (1998) [video]

Re:Growing a Language, by Guy Steele (1998) [video] by jVinc on Monday April 16, 2018 @04:42PM (#16852567)

I always find this an odd reason to be against usable features. I have inherited codebases in extremely confined languages as have I inherited codebases in very permitting high-level languages Python, and never have I though "Thank good this language decided to restrict its reach in order to confine the programmer to a smaller subset which made it harder for him to mess up."

Often have I though "My good, if only the language had better supported what the programmer is trying to implement himself through horrible hacks, then I wouldn't be sitting here trying to wonder exactly what mistakes he made that casuses everything to crash inexplicably."

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Re:Growing a Language, by Guy Steele (1998) [video] by sharpercoder on Monday April 16, 2018 @04:58PM (#16852711)

I guess the culture around a language matters significantly. For instance, there is quite a specific culture around the Rust community/language. The focus on the language ergonomics is also reflected in many packages. Same goes for the mutability/immutability aspect of code.

A second example of this culture is the go language. I read a few repo's, and the same style of programming is seemingly applied throughout.

For the Java case, I can actually see operator overloading going haywaire over many codebases. The same as overengineering is a typical trait associated with Java.

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