Interesting comment about Google Go

[Andrew Lentvorski]

SJS wrote:
> begin  quoting chris at seberino.org as of Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 08:47:54PM -0800:
>>                                     My only beef is how it gets to verbose.
>> Guido says one line in Python or Ruby is often equal to 10 lines of Java.  I
>> think I see his point.
> 
> Verboseness is often the result of not being cryptic.
> 
> If it takes you ten minutes to figure out one line of code, rather than one
> minute to figure out ten lines of code, then terseness is no longer an asset.

There's a balance.  I try to remember that I will be reading the code in 
12 months and not have any clue as to what it is doing.  That limits my 
cleverness.


I find that Java is about 4x the line of code count of my Python.  But, 
I try not to be too terse in my Python.

When I was teaching CS530, the final count for my Python implementation 
was about 400 lines, my Java version was about 1800 lines.  The students 
averaged about 4000 lines.  I made sure that I wrote a Java version so 
that I understood exactly what kind of grief I was causing them with the 
assignments and testing infrastructure.

After that class, they understood exactly what they liked about Java and 
what they absolutely hated about Java.

> Plus, a lot of people complain about Java's verboseness when they're not
> really complaining about the number of statements, but rather that they
> get to type out things like "java.io.BufferedInputStream" rather than a
> nice short "bufinput" instead.
> 
> These people need to shut up, put down the mouse, and learn to touch-type.

Um, no.  My environment needs to learn to autocomplete.  If your 
language prevents that, then it's a bad language.

My fingers have better things to do than type verbose names, over, and 
over, and over ...

-a