Re:The ups and downs of porting 50k lines of C++ to Go (2015)
by Barrin92 on Thursday March 14, 2019 @05:54AM
(#19387758)
I disagree strongly, at least as far as my intuition is concerned.
it's not code density that matters, it's "context density". Long drawn out functions are usually not hard to read because they are long, but because it's not clear what they are about. It's lack of conciseness on part of the programs logic that makes programmers lose focus, not code density.
As an example, think of a few fairly long switch statements or pattern matching logic. It's non-dense code depending on your language, but not hard to understand even if long. In contrast, some convoluted Haskell syntax with weird operators you've never seen is almost mentally incomprehensible.
On these terms it's true that Golang is not 'text dense' but it doesn't matter, it stops semantics from being overly complicated, and it encourages simple structures that don't go overboard on condensing information.
it's not code density that matters, it's "context density". Long drawn out functions are usually not hard to read because they are long, but because it's not clear what they are about. It's lack of conciseness on part of the programs logic that makes programmers lose focus, not code density.
As an example, think of a few fairly long switch statements or pattern matching logic. It's non-dense code depending on your language, but not hard to understand even if long. In contrast, some convoluted Haskell syntax with weird operators you've never seen is almost mentally incomprehensible.
On these terms it's true that Golang is not 'text dense' but it doesn't matter, it stops semantics from being overly complicated, and it encourages simple structures that don't go overboard on condensing information.