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Comment by thrown_22 | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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