Erlang will replace Java in the next 2 years as the standard for Enterprise Applications

Re:Erlang will replace Java in the next 2 years as the stand... by silentbicycle on Thursday September 11, 2008 @12:30AM (#301106)

If cutting out boilerplate to sharpen focus on the actual code doesn't help make it easier to understand, then something is seriously wrong.

Part of writing good code, whether two pages of brilliance or twenty of gradual brilliance, is conveying intent in the human-readable parts. The parser doesn't care if all the functions have names like doTheNextThing() or french_onion_soup, but it would be a slap in the face to any future maintainers.

Choosing informative names and separating a program along clear conceptual boundaries can be a greater aid to understanding than any syntactic redundancies. Well-placed comments help smooth things over, particularly notes on why a particular approach was chosen. The names themselves should be able to convey what is going on in most cases.

(For distilled wisdom along those lines, see _Thinking Forth_ by Leo Brodie, also online at http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/.)

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Re:Erlang will replace Java in the next 2 years as the stand... by gaius on Thursday September 11, 2008 @04:55PM (#301758)

I have that book, and I am a big fan of Forth.

It's not unusual now for some of my source files to be more comments than code, the comments explain my intent and the assumptions I have made.

I'm gonna call a function french_onion_soup tomorrow just for larks :-)

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Re:Erlang will replace Java in the next 2 years as the stand... by silentbicycle on Thursday September 11, 2008 @07:19PM (#301881)

For leeks, you mean. :)

The biggest thing I learned from Forth is that if I'm about to add a comment inside a function because something needs clarification, I should probably try breaking it out and thinking up a descriptive name instead.

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