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2 points by conanite 5695 days ago | link | parent

Have a look at http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/02/portrait-of-n00b.htm... ... you might find it reeks of arrogance, or you might enjoy it:

"The sticking point is compression-tolerance. As you write code through your career, especially if it's code spanning very different languages and problem domains, your tolerance for code compression increases. It's no different from the progression from reading children's books with giant text to increasingly complex novels with smaller text and bigger words."

If my understanding is vaguely correct, Yegge argues for compact code for the same reasons pg does.

I personally wish there were a means to quickly identify the data-type

Something that an editor for a dynamic language can give you is run-time analysis of your code - so, indeed, a mouse-over could in fact give you a list of the types assigned to any given symbol. This is something I'd love to get welder to do ... it's entirely possible, in theory :)

Alternatively, you could write your own function definition macro that lets you specify param types and checks them for you at runtime:

  (typed-fn fillcup ((string with) (table size)) 
    (let ...
But my tendons recoil in horror at the implications of this. Remember: strong typing hurts your keyboard!


2 points by thaddeus 5695 days ago | link

I enjoyed the first half - then he went on and on and on....

My goal is to try making code readable enough that documentation or 'metadata' is barely needed. I'm going to rework my code and start keeping my code idealized - not descriptive - not short.

I'm going see how it works when I drop the data type tagging all together and hope one day when I am a little more knowledgeable I will be able to craft a solution.

Maybe in a few years I'll let you know how it went :) T

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