I'd go so far as to say wordiness is not all bad. If you can quickly understand the syntactical possibilities of a language and immediately recognize them [i.e. without some hifalutin IDE turning things colors and producing tooltips and popups to clue you in], then that's useful. If there are twice as many characters by but they're more easily and quickly understood by a larger developer community including relatively novice folk, then that beats brevity in my book.
Having odd Martian-esque chunks like "[foo <- blat =} arg !! split# : map my foot?" may do wonderful things, but that's about how some of these "concise" languages look to many developers -- they're absolutely clear as mud. Almost all Java boils down to a few operators class, object, and field references and method invocations. The syntax is simple and predictable and that layer of the program's flow and structure is entirely obvious at a glance to even fairly junior developers. It may be a bit verbose and not look like a DSL -- but that's actually a good thing, it looks like what it is instead of something that makes you wonder what the bloody hell it is. That's not to say one shouldn't strive for fluent APIs, but the fact that the result is actually still looks like the progamming language and is thus decipherable to those who know the language but not the domain is not a bad thing. Else every file and module can quickly become its own domain indecipherable to all outsiders. Just let a horde of creative, undisciplined developers loose and watch it happen. -- Jess holle --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
