I think it was Bjarne Stroustrup who said something like - "don't be clever, be simple and obvious".
... still nice article... ;)
... still nice article... ;)
You still need to be C++ fluent enough to be able to read other people's code. And it's not like everybody has the same definition of "simple and obvious".
No, but it's like we can expect of people to more or less agree on a definition of "simple and obvious" or else be outliers.
That is a very good point. I had an interesting discussion with a Perl programmer once regarding the use of Perl's default variable $_ - to him, code that relied heavily on it was straightforward and readable. But to a newcomer, it can be very tricky to figure out what is going on. And even to an experienced Perl programmer, it can increase the mental overhead of parsing code significantly if s/he is not used to it.
But that is one thing I like about Go, because "idiomatic" Go code tends to be very straightforward and readable.
I love what they've done with Go from my experience with it so far, they hit the target on a number of design fronts.
Dijkstra (1972) The Humble Programmer (EWD340).