Redundancy in Programming Languages

[bearophile]

Walter Bright Wrote:
> http://reddit.com/info/6ip9w/comments/

A possible link:
http://dobbscodetalk.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=Redundancy-in-Programming-Languages.html&Itemid=29

I have already answered to some of the points of that article in the last days in the newsgroup, I generally like that article, it sums part of the discussions seen so far (but I don't agree with everything it says).

There's a balance: redundancy may avoid you some bugs, but may slow down your programming a bit, or it may make your code a bit less readable, so it's always a matter of balance, because such extra programming speed may be used to write more unit tests that are able to catch bugs (often higher-level bugs than a wrongly spelled variable name. I have nearly never fallen in that trap in Python, so it's not that common, even if I don't use a Python lint program). That's why Python programming is often faster, but you end writing many unittests/doctests that burn part of that saved time.
Modern IDEs may speed up your programming a lot, so you may end writing code quickly even if you use very redundant languages like Java.

And such sweet spot may be different for different people: I am sure I may enjoy more redundancy if I am a newbie programmer (or even when I am a newbie for a specific language but not for programming), Pascal was a good example of more constrained and more redundant language useful for teaching programming. Today Java is another example.

Bye, and thank you for such little articles,
bearophile