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Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]

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Re: Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]

#151
post #14

This talk has a lot of very weak points. He made the claim that more features hurt readability (~6:10), because when you are reading you have to waste time thinking about why the programmer chose the set of features he did to write the code. To make that kind of claim without qualifications is just ridiculous - if it were true, why add any feature to a programming language at all? Especially if one believes readabili…

As someone maintaining an 18 year old code base, I've long held the same opinions as Rob. I often describe myself as the dumbest person on my team and then go on to say how fortunate it was that I was here first. All my smart people need to dumb stuff down enough that I can understand it. Which means we have a prayer of supporting it. Obviously I can't force everything through that filter, some problems require compl…

> Hacker News is full of really bright people who like the expressiveness of Haskell et al. So it's not surprising that Rob's not going over well here. Just saying that us dumb people really appreciate his efforts.

Some of us use Haskell because we're also dumb people.

Re: Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]

#152
post #98
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the politest description I can provide of the experience of tracking down GC bugs is that they interacted with other features in complicated and error prone ways.

But was that code in the GC implementation, or your program? Because if its in the implementation, then that is a different matter. We have to distinguish between simplicity of implementation vs simplicity provided the user. I agree that if it is not implemented correctly, it can be a net loss in simplicity.

It was code in my program.
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