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  • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    6·
    6 hours ago

    Not when taken to such an extreme so as to obfuscate the meaning and behavior of code, and make it difficult to understand how you would arrive at that code.

    Sane defaults serve to reduce verbosity without obfuscating meaning, simpler syntax with different ordering and fewer tokens reduce verbosity to make the code easier to read by reducing the amount of text you have to pay attention to to understand what the result is.

    I imagine there’s also a distinction to be made between verbosity and redundancy - sometimes extra text might fail to carry information, or carry information that’s already carried elsewhere. I’m not sure where the line should be drawn, because sometimes duplicate information can be helpful, and spacing out information with technically meaningless text has value for readability, but I feel like it’s there.

    • acargitz@lemmy.ca
      1·
      3 hours ago

      Frankly, I have way more often ended up scratching my head for some cryptic piece of syntax than the opposite. Sure I could sit down and spend the rest of my life learning each language designer’s favourite syntax optimisations, but I kinda don’t want to. I’m a human, not a parser.

      And frankly, a good IDE editor should be able to fold/unfold verbose syntax. Better for it then to be there and folded, than for it to not be there and for someone to have to work backwards the intendrd meaning of every single line of code.