Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

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"simple" is, unfortunately, not a simple concept, nor does everyone agree on its effects on programs written in a language that is or is not simple.

Some people do believe that, let's say "conceptually parsimonious" languages (using complicated words to describe simplicity is amusing to me, sorry) do exactly what you say. Others believe that complexity inherently exists, and you can put it in the language, where a compiler can tirelessly check certain properties for you or a runtime can do magical complicated work on your behalf, or you can put it in the programs, where users have to check such things themselves.

Another way I heard this expressed one time is Ruby vs Python. I once heard someone talk about how they preferred Python as a language more, because it was simpler, but enjoyed actually programming in Ruby more, even thought it was more complex, and they value simplicity. The reason is that all of that nasty ugly stuff Ruby lets you do makes you be able to make extremely nice APIs. Things you couldn't do, or just folks don't do, in Python. And therefore they ended up liking using Ruby more in practice.

I suspect that this is a topic that we, as a profession, will debate about endlessly.

> Others believe that complexity inherently exists, and you can put it in the language, where a compiler can tirelessly check certain properties for you or a runtime can do magical complicated work on your behalf, or you can put it in the programs, where users have to check such things themselves.

I think we'd all agree there's a spectrum, with, say, Assembly on one end and Idris on the other, where neither Zig nor Rust are near either extreme, and are actually rather close to each other. It's not a matter of accepting or rejecting a principle, but on picking slightly different sweet spots (hopefully) on a tradeoff spectrum.

Rust doesn't check at compile-time most things that could be checked at compile-time. In fact both language check almost the same things at compile-time, and almost the same things at runtime. The design differences come down to one or two things that are clearly tricky and that neither language "does for you" -- i.e. you still need to think about them -- but are, indeed, checked in different ways.

Yep. I agree they’re closer to each other than the extremes for sure.

There is also the notion of languages you love writing code in vs languages you like reading code in. Languages with more powerful abstraction abilities bring joy to the writer but make things tedious for the reader.

I don't agree with that. For example, I think it brings me joy as a reader that I can tell at a glance from a function signature which arguments are modified and which ones are just read. Without the abstraction of mutable and immutable references I would have to read the entire source code of the function and every function it calls to know for sure what it does with the pointers. It also brings me joy as a reader that common functionality like equality comparisons or string formatting can be derived by the compiler, instead of having separate hand-made implementations for each data structure, which might have subtle differences.

Totally.

I personally would not agree with

> Languages with more powerful abstraction abilities bring joy to the writer but make things tedious for the reader.

I find map/filter to be easier to read than a C-style for loop. Things that are conceptually denser make discussion between experts easier, even if it makes things harder for non-experts. This is why jargon exists, for example.

Ah yes - that makes sense. I should have been more precise - I meant abstractions that allow you to add opaqueness (like macros and operator overloading). Again culture plays a role here too - some communities normalize such abstractions more than others.

In short I believe languages that one can pick up in a couple of days and then read code where reasoning of the code is highly local would stand a higher chance of being perceived as simple.

As always it depends. If you're thinking about preprocessor macros and operator overloading from C++, sure, those can be annoying, it's more to do with C++'s implementation and usage of them than the features themselves. You might want to try Common Lisp sometime; so much of the base language is made up of macros without which programs would be neither pleasant to read or write, and the language itself provides facilities to ask "ok but what function(s) are actually going to get called with this data" so that even not-so-local things like e.g. transparent logging of a call's input/output become visible if you need to know. But CL is not a language one can pick up in a couple of days -- albeit CL shops report success in getting new hires to be productive after a week or two of reading a book and the company code, which is a common onboarding time at many companies with any language.

Programmers notoriously conflate "simple" and "easy" (classic talk: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/) and so I believe languages that are easy for a lot of programmers will also be perceived as simple, whether or not that's accurate.

Without powerful abstraction (of course used sparingly) you will just copy-paste the same logic in multiple places. Which is error prone and unmaintainable. And I would argue that even though a small part of it may be easier to read, you will have a harder time getting the big picture with low abstraction.

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