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Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

thume.ca

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Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#51

Post by nateberkopec »

hart_russell wrote: post #48
ufmace wrote: post #9

I haven't made it through the whole thing yet, but I do want to register a vote in favor of using Lines Of Code count as a rough measure of program complexity. I think it's a perfectly valid things to do, provided that it isn't used as an evaluation metric and nobody is gaming it, and everyone is a reasonably good programmer, not doing crazy things like trying to stuff a massive algorithm onto one line to be clever,…

I'd like to hear others' opinions: There's a guy at my work who loves to use doubly, triply, quadruple-ly nested ternary operators. I always find them super hard to read. Am I just a dunce, or do I have a point in thinking it's unnecessarily terse.

I love ternary operators, but nesting them is a recipe for turning your code into an unreadable mess.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#52

Post by WalterBright »

hart_russell wrote: post #48
ufmace wrote: post #9

I haven't made it through the whole thing yet, but I do want to register a vote in favor of using Lines Of Code count as a rough measure of program complexity. I think it's a perfectly valid things to do, provided that it isn't used as an evaluation metric and nobody is gaming it, and everyone is a reasonably good programmer, not doing crazy things like trying to stuff a massive algorithm onto one line to be clever,…

I'd like to hear others' opinions: There's a guy at my work who loves to use doubly, triply, quadruple-ly nested ternary operators. I always find them super hard to read. Am I just a dunce, or do I have a point in thinking it's unnecessarily terse.

Format them like you would if-else, then they're easy to read:

    x = y ? 1
          : 2;

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#53

Post by ncmncm »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #44
ncmncm wrote: post #35

I find it curious that both the team that used C++, and the author, both appear to believe that sum types and related facilities are not usable or conveniently expressible in C++. I got that Boost Spirit, a powerful parsing library, was forbidden. Were all the Boost libraries similarly embargoed?

> Boost Spirit, a powerful parsing library I regularly use Boost Spirit as an example of "sounds good but actually a nightmare", and am always surprised to see it mentioned in the wild. It is truly a modern horror. Boost is like Apache -- a collection of libraries of various quality and stage of development, not all alike. A lot of stuff in there is designed to prove out experimental language features ahead of the ne…

You won't catch me arguing in favor of using Spirit.

In general, it is rarely a good idea to rely on a library you don't understand.

But Boost has serviceable variant, option, and result types.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#54

Post by 1f60c »

hart_russell wrote: post #48
ufmace wrote: post #9

I haven't made it through the whole thing yet, but I do want to register a vote in favor of using Lines Of Code count as a rough measure of program complexity. I think it's a perfectly valid things to do, provided that it isn't used as an evaluation metric and nobody is gaming it, and everyone is a reasonably good programmer, not doing crazy things like trying to stuff a massive algorithm onto one line to be clever,…

I'd like to hear others' opinions: There's a guy at my work who loves to use doubly, triply, quadruple-ly nested ternary operators. I always find them super hard to read. Am I just a dunce, or do I have a point in thinking it's unnecessarily terse.

The latter, IMO.

Something like

  Screen.oled ? "black" : "rgb(21,21,21)"
is easy enough to read. Beyond that, if statements win for me.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#55

Post by giggzy »

hart_russell wrote: post #48
ufmace wrote: post #9

I haven't made it through the whole thing yet, but I do want to register a vote in favor of using Lines Of Code count as a rough measure of program complexity. I think it's a perfectly valid things to do, provided that it isn't used as an evaluation metric and nobody is gaming it, and everyone is a reasonably good programmer, not doing crazy things like trying to stuff a massive algorithm onto one line to be clever,…

I'd like to hear others' opinions: There's a guy at my work who loves to use doubly, triply, quadruple-ly nested ternary operators. I always find them super hard to read. Am I just a dunce, or do I have a point in thinking it's unnecessarily terse.

I prefer less terse code for readability too. LOC is a decent approximation for complexity but it breaks down when people optimize for it.

It's a tricky problem to decide which idioms are most expressive/readable/maintainable as it's has a group dynamic. My rule of thumb, if I feel I've written clever code it's time to rethink approach.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#56

Post by FullyFunctional »

That was a really interesting article. I completely agree with

>>> Abstractions may make things easier to extend in the future, or guard against certain types of errors, but they need to be considered against the fact that you may end up with 3 times the amount of code to understand and refactor, 3 times the amount of possible locations for bugs and less time left to spend on testing and further development.

Choosing when and how to abstract is key. Abstraction in a fashion extends the language so you are trading off a burden on the reader (who have to learn and trust the abstraction) for increased expressiveness. Don't overdo it. (And don't abstract idioms).

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#57

Post by galaxyLogic »

I think the big big result from this study is: "Python: half the size !".

A dynamic language like Python is better here, 2x better. I assume similar results would apply to other dynamic languages like JavaScript, Lisp, Smalltalk, Groovy etc.

This does not say that static typing should not be used but I think it shows unequivocally that there is a considerable extra development cost associated with static typing.

You might say that surely that additional cost would be compensated in reducing the cost of maintenance later. Maybe but I'm not sure.

Any development effort of significant size (like writing a compiler here) is a combination of writing new code and adapting and modifying code already written. "Maintenance" is part of development.

This is quite a quantitative study which gives credence to the claims of advocates of dynamic languages.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#59

Post by lyjackal »

hart_russell wrote: post #48
ufmace wrote: post #9

I haven't made it through the whole thing yet, but I do want to register a vote in favor of using Lines Of Code count as a rough measure of program complexity. I think it's a perfectly valid things to do, provided that it isn't used as an evaluation metric and nobody is gaming it, and everyone is a reasonably good programmer, not doing crazy things like trying to stuff a massive algorithm onto one line to be clever,…

I'd like to hear others' opinions: There's a guy at my work who loves to use doubly, triply, quadruple-ly nested ternary operators. I always find them super hard to read. Am I just a dunce, or do I have a point in thinking it's unnecessarily terse.

Usually it's awful. I wish JavaScript had if else expressions. Sometimes it can help to break up the lines with indents if you need a single expression:

  var myvar = foo

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#60

Post by nickysielicki »

hart_russell wrote: post #48
ufmace wrote: post #9

I haven't made it through the whole thing yet, but I do want to register a vote in favor of using Lines Of Code count as a rough measure of program complexity. I think it's a perfectly valid things to do, provided that it isn't used as an evaluation metric and nobody is gaming it, and everyone is a reasonably good programmer, not doing crazy things like trying to stuff a massive algorithm onto one line to be clever,…

I'd like to hear others' opinions: There's a guy at my work who loves to use doubly, triply, quadruple-ly nested ternary operators. I always find them super hard to read. Am I just a dunce, or do I have a point in thinking it's unnecessarily terse.

It depends on the context. Declarative vs procedural. Ternary statements are 2:1 multiplexors.
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