Portrait of a Noob

I'm suprised no one mentions this, good code does not need comments, because it clearly speaks with variable names and function names.

The Lisp function Yegge gives, is horrible in that aspect. for example this piece of code:

  (if (or (= tt js2-LB) (= tt js2-LC))

should really be more like

  (if (matches-js2-line-ending current_token))

No matter "how good you are" code reading is faster if what you read matches with what you're doing in English.

A nice reminder that skill and raw brainpower are two different things, and the latter can retard development of the former. I worked with many pieces of code written by one particular coworker of mine who was way too smart for his own good. His code was littered with little formulae like that, repeated again and again throughout a file, and to him it was obvious at a glance what they meant. It was also easy for him to scan through his code and find errors in these expressions, as easy as it is for you or me to see that "(matthes-js2-line-ending ..." contains a typo. I have no idea how he coped with finding and changing every instance of a formula that needed to be changed. For me it was a slog every time I had to read, change, or debug his code.

P.S. The most frequent and flagrant was calculating array indices into multi-dimensional arrays in C++. It's so easy to write a simple class that lets you do this:

  arr(n1 + i, n2 + j, n3 + k) = calc_foo(i, j, k);

instead of this:

  arr[n3 + k + (n2 + j) * (nz + (n1 + i) * ny)] = calc_foo(i, j, k);

He's spot-on about Java being a safe-haven for "data modeling" geeks who are afraid of doing real work. Writing a whole bunch of getters and setters in a freshly minted Java class certainly feels like work. However, I think he gets it wrong when he puts OCaml on the extreme "for you to model everything" end of the spectrum:

And Haskell, OCaml and their ilk are part of a 45-year-old static-typing movement within academia to try to force people to model everything. Programmers hate that. These languages will never, ever enjoy any substantial commercial success

Hold on a minute...last time I checked OCaml was a dialect of ML. ML does not ask you to "statically" type everything, in fact it does the opposite. It infers all the types. Sure, it allows you to hint types to the compiler, but this is not necessary. You get all the benefits of "static" type checking through ML's concept of type inference. It's designed specifically to make it less work for the programmer to enjoy the benefits of a sound, correct type system.

If you want to learn more about type inference in ML, check out this short introduction: http://bit.ly/8WEhD8

But he would be lying. Yegge would rather maintain the concise code with sparse comments if and only if it were Yegge's concise code with sparse comments. If it were someone else's, he'd rather it were in fact rather heavily commented.

I've shared Yegge's disdain for static typing for quite some time. One of the best examples of how awful it can be is type hinting (optional type constraints on parameters) in PHP. Many times I've explained to people why type hints are awful thing deserving banishment to hell — along with Facebook suggestions and Microsoft product recommendations — but so many PHP programmers seem to love them! Now that I read this I can see why that sort of thinking is bound to exist for a language like PHP (read: noobs).

Recently, however, I've been getting into Haskell and in doing so I found my opinion on static typing left a little beaten in the legs and suffering some obvious facial wounds. Static typing works in Haskell, I'm pretty sure of that. The question I'm left with is, why?

I think it might have something to do with the fact that type checks in class-based OO languages don't even begin to insure the program correctness that novices are often foolish enough to think they do. Everyone else recognizes the need for all manner of testing, and that's how correctness is proved (albeit, approximately) in imperative languages. In Haskell, I've found that type checks go quite some way to proving correctness, no really! (They don't actually prove correctness but proofs of correctness would be impossible without them). Without even bothering to do any proofs or testing you get a much more rigorous check for correctness in Haskell than you do when a Java program successfully compiles.

I can't emphasize this difference enough. To me static typing in Java is an annoyance and a lie. And so when I program in a language that teeters between static and dynamic typing, such as PHP, I go out of my way to write libraries that make things more dynamic (I've got one GitHub) and I call men who advocate aforementioned type hinting, girls names. In Haskell, it's totally different; it actually works; it's actually useful. Not to mention the clever stuff that you can do with types which I couldn't begin to do justice here given my inexperience.