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Comment by scythe | Hacker News Reader

Saying that a codebase needs to be small is like saying an airplane needs to be light: yes, it's true, in fact it's plain-and-simple obvious, but it doesn't reveal any of the hidden secrets and planning and so forth that are basically necessary to keep a codebase small and manageable. Even high-powered polymorphic languages a la Lisp will happily hand you enough rope to drown yourself in.

If you look at code as basically a description of what a program does, like, a formal description, it's unsurprising that conciseness and clarity are not entirely unrelated and that redundancy is annoying for anyone who has to read it. What's not obvious is the most clear or concise way to describe what the program does, and this is just as true in a computer language as in say a natural language.

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Yeah, and if I went through the codebase for my current project and added a bunch of line breaks, I'd double the code "size" according to the LOC metric without changing anything about the complexity at all.

Macros kinda terrify me because they mean I can't glance at a random 5-line fragment and know exactly what's happening. I'm not convinced that they add to clarity, even while doing a lot for conciseness. To be fair, I've never used them on a project that was bigger than "tiny", so maybe I'm just casting aspersions on something I don't understand.

After macros, then what? Is the slightly redundant Foo foo = foos.next() in Java really hurting clarity that bad? I mean, yeah, the type should be inferred there but is that the reason big projects get unmanageable? Or is it higher-level architectural bloat?

EDIT: Wow. Any downvoters want to explain why this comment is so offensive to them? Perhaps they could contribute their own thoughts about complexity and code bloat?

     Macros kinda terrify me because they mean I can't 
     glance at a random 5-line fragment and know exactly
     what's happening

Higher-level languages like Java running on top of advanced VMs like the Hotspot JVM -- are high-level enough such that you NEVER know what's happening.

Even dropping to JVM bytecode doesn't help you much, as that doesn't show you how data moves in and out of the registers, how decisions on compiling hotspots / inlining functions are made, or how allocated objects move through GC-generations. You also lose control a lot. When you drop down to assembly, tail-calls are trivial for instance, not to mention dealing with cache pressure becomes a lot simpler.

What high-level languages give you (versus assembly) is a way to express intent, rather than details that you don't care about in general.

Which is no different from having macros in your language, or other high-level abstractions, in which you invent your own language for expressing intent, rather than deal with useless details that you don't care about 99% of the time.

    Foo foo = foos.next()

But that line isn't really clear. It's saying stuff like - give me a Foo right now. But what happens when there are no more Foos to be given? Does it return a Null? Does it trigger an exception? That line of code also doesn't express intent. So you've got a Foo. Now what? And have I mentioned that objects in "foos" may not be Foo instances?

Basically that whole line of code is totally worthless boilerplate.

On your first point, I meant logically what's happening, not the exact memory and heap layout. I'm pretty sure you can take that for granted in any discussion about programming ever unless the person says "in regards to the exact stack and heap layout".

You don't know the heap layout in C either, at least not without some extreme measures like reading the values of pointers, and you don't usually care.

You can't just say "oh this is sort of like this so we'll just collapse all the differences". Macros change your program logically (as in not just perf improvements) prior to compilation. Not-macros do not. That's a big difference.

That line is crystal clear (as shorthand) to a Java developer because "foos" is most likely an Iterator<Foo> which will throw an exception when there are no more foos. In an actual program it will be very explicit that it's an Iterator<Foo>. That's a context thing that's specific to Java where all Iterators behave the same way. The difference between the standard java.util stuff and macros is that each shop or team has their own macros and in my limited experience with macros, it is not always easy to tell where they're in effect.

And, the line isn't boilerplate. We're creating a reference to a Foo and assigning a value to the destination of that reference. Presumably, we're going to do some stuff with it later. Otherwise, yes, we would not be bothering to pop one out of the iterator. Is that clear now? What actual point are you trying to prove in this comment? My comment was sort of a request for actual constructive solutions. You've provided non-sequitors.

If you haven't seen Trusting Trust already, you should read it: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html . It's short and smart.

The brief summary is, of course, you can almost never really know "logically what's happening", even in nice reliable languages like Java or Python or Haskell or Ruby or C.[0]

The easy solution (and the one that every working programmer makes every day) is to say: well, let's assume that the compiler is non-malicious and has relatively few bugs that will impact me. That's a fair response.

Next we run into the fact that just because you call a function, and that function happens to be called add(x,y), doesn't actually mean that the function will return the sum of x and y. In the absence of further evidence, it could be an HTTP server or fill your hard drive with infinite copies of Das Kapital or anything at all. The normal solutions proposed to this are (1) read the documentation, or (2) read the code. Those are both workable solutions.

Then macros come into the picture. I fail to see how the already-heavily-used techniques of (1) reading documentation and (2) reading the implementation of the macro, which seem to be at least tolerable and mostly workable with functions suddenly fall apart with macros.

[0] C and C++ have the preprocessor and macros anyway, which "change your program logically...prior to compilation", so I won't mention them further in this comment.

Yeah, my distrust for macros is mostly informed by my experience with C/C++ preprocessors, which have led to really annoying facepalms in my personal history.

But, as I said, I haven't actually used macros for a large project so maybe they're more workable than I give them credit for.

When I think of macros, I'm generally thinking about getting a syntax tree at runtime and doing transformations on it.

The closest thing related to this in a mainstream language is LINQ in .NET. When passing a lambda expression, you can either get a method reference that you can execute, or you can get a syntax tree of that expression.

It is effectively used in Linq to Sql to query databases using the same syntax you would use for querying in-memory collections of objects. You can also teach it to do pretty sweat things, like doing data transformations using the GPU. Check out this project for instance: http://brahma.ananthonline.net/

Also, macros are not necessarily executed at compile-time as in C/C++ - in Lisp a macro has no boundaries to when or how it gets executed. A macro is just a piece of code that can call normal functions and that returns a piece of code that will then get executed.

One common use-case is for achieving lazy evaluation in a language that isn't lazy and so most macros are trivial to understand. But you can have other use-cases, like in the above example with Linq, where the piece of code getting generated depends on runtime conditions.

I do agree that macros can make code harder to understand, but then again, I've seen horribly over-engineered, poorly implemented and unreadable pieces of Java code and so I think it all comes down to having a culture for code readability than about having a language that forces you to do things in a certain way.

Yes, but that (specific) example is a great example of a waste of space in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases. Let me show you examples of code that hides that whole iterator groadyness:

Python

for foo in Foos: baz(foo)

Common Lisp:

(loop for foo in Foos do (baz foo))

Perl:

foreach my $foo (@Foos) { baz(foo); }

C++ has a foreach construct as well, but it's a bit shoehorned. I'm relatively certain C# has some shorthand here for the same thing, and IIRC, it flows nicely.

There is no "Most likely", no "exception", it's very straightforward.

Rarely - very rarely - I care about the mechanisms of initialization, nexting, and termination. The rest of the time, (loop for var in list do) gets me by just fine.

* Macros change your program logically (as in not just perf improvements) prior to compilation. Not-macros do not. That's a big difference.*

It's no different than hunting through framework documentation.

Uh. Java has a foreach operator. Has had it for almost a decade now. Almost the same as the C# operator. You might want to consider dialing down your self-assuredness if you don't know the basic commands in the language being discussed.

And macros are vastly different from hunting through framework documentation, that's not the same ballpark or even the same sport. If you want macro-like behavior in Java, you can always break out AspectJ, which I strongly recommend against doing due to my biases against code that changes in between me typing it and it running.

No, it's exactly the same. It's reading the things you are using to understand what they do.

In Perl you'd be more likely to write:

bar($_) for @Foos;

In my mind excessive line breaks ARE a problem.

A key skill in programming is holding a large number of concepts together at once and thinking about them together. It's like holding up a big stack of bowls, plates, silverware, glasses and other stuff.

Large screen area makes it possible to scan this stuff with your eyes, which increases your effective working memory.

If your code takes up 3x the space, you can fit less on your screen, so your effective working memory is smaller. Practically, it makes you less intelligent.

Care to point out a serious project with a line break problem?

The "braces on separate lines" style contributes to a line break problem, in my opinion. If you use this style and have nice, concise methods and/or functions, the extra lines added for each start brace can take up a noticeable amount of your code window's real estate.

There are other code style choices that increase line count which I dislike for the same reason, this is just the first one that came to mind.

You don't really want to know everything that's going on. At some point, and over a certain project size, you just have to trust some stuff and use higher abstractions when reading/writing code. Macros are one of the tools you have for doing this in an orderly, not-want-to-kill-yourself way.

So yeah, they hide stuff, but when you have no choice but to hide stuff they can do it quite well.

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