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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

I see this largely as a language failure.

Alot of popular languages make it really easy to write code, but hard to maintain it .

It's one of the reasons I like Rust so much,even for relatively high level code. It has one of the srictest type systems and std/library ecosystems of any language in existence, which tends to make code very robust and easy to refactor.

I often wish for a language that has a similarly strict type type/ecosystem but is higher level. Swift is quite close, but very Mac OS centric. Haskell has exceptions, which are often used for error handling, making code less robust (plus the ecosystem is small). Other languages like Ada/Spark or Idris are way too fringe...

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>Alot of popular languages make it really easy to write code, but hard to maintain it .

The language you're writing in has next to no meaningful impact on long term maintenance. When you're trying to do software archeology on why a function even exists the types it has will not help you figure out it's there because between 1996 and 2002 there was a tax rebate on capex for rocket development.

You need human understandable documentation, not fancy language features. This is no where near as sexy so no one does documentation and we're in the middle of a digital dark age.

I disagree. Language does matter for long term maintenance. For instance with a tax rebate.

Static typing - a fancy language feature - can immediately tell you the function deals with money. +1 for maintenance. Static typing with a solid IDE will immediately reveal everywhere the function is used. +1.

Languages shepherd you into certain designs or mistakes by making some things easier than others, such as when class inheritance can be easily abused in OO languages, cryptic one liners are easy in Perl, point-free cleverness in Haskell, monkey patching in dynamic languages, etc. +/-1 depending.

Per documentation, languages come with tools and best practices: Javadoc, Godoc, Rustdoc; C# even has a dedicated comment syntax for documentation - a fancy language feature. +1. No one does documentation, until the language tooling forces them to.

That said, BG (Before Git) and widespread use of source control, as in '96 to '02, was a dark age. We know more now.

> The language you're writing in has next to no meaningful impact on long term maintenance.

I disagree.

If you abandon a large block of code for a year, then come back to it, depending on the language, it may be difficult to grok what the code was doing and how it worked.

If it's Java, the tendency to create 100 levels of abstraction make it hard to reason about. If it's Python without type annotations, then your IDE may not be able to determine the types of variables, so it's difficult to determine what can be done with an object.

If it's Perl, then God help you. May He have mercy on your soul.

What about F#? Often seems underappreciated

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