Comment by blub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blub | Hacker News Reader

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LOC means a lot when it comes to:

* reading and trying to understand source code

* maintaining source code

* typing and programming-related injuries

The dynamic-typed camp argues that even declaring a variable is a pain. Conciseness is one of the favourite features of JS/Ruby/Python developers and prolixity is universaly loathed in Java.

Please expand on your assertion that subtle programming errors are caused by templates. I'm interested especially in errors as a consequence of using templates from the STL or to build generic code. i.e: not metaprogramming

> reading and trying to understand source code ... maintaining source code

I think it helps but in general those things are not related very well. For examples guess what this line of code does (this is APL) ?

    X[⍋X+.≠' ';]

According to APL's Wikipedia entry it "sorts a word list stored in matrix X according to word length". It is just 1 line of code so it wins there. But now imagine reading code like that and maintaining it.

It's silly to expect to be able to understand text in a foreign language. If you want to read APL, learn APL; It's a great language.

An extreme example doesn't prove much and there are many languages that successfully balance readability with LOC. e.g: Python, JS.

Right, I was just trying to highlight that a simple metric of LOCs is not enough. One can right cryptic code to minimize LOCs but that usually leads in harder to read and maintain code.

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