Re:“I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interv...
by gknoy on Saturday December 05, 2020 @12:32AM
(#25312058)
Tests, linting, and code review are all tools that we use to find mistakes before they get into production code.
A "dumbed-down" language is a tool that prevents one from being able to write certain classes of errors (e.g. some of the footguns from C).
Changing the language doesn't mean you make less mistakes, but it means that you make different kind of mistakes. I'm rather unlikely to make an error related to memory allocation in Python or Java, for example.
None of which is related to using a dumbed-down language.
> At Google's scale, I can completely understand why they might feel that developing a new tool was the best way to prevent a core set of problems.
There's plenty of research around software reliability and on the sources of bugs across different languages.
Research shows that verbose languages e.g. Java don't have lower bug rates or better maintainability than expressive languages like Python.
Dumbing down a language, reducing expressiveness and introducing boilerplate does not help. If anything, it removes the attention of the developers from the core aspects of an application.