Too much flexibility is dangerous for large systems

[spir]

On 01/18/2011 12:41 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> bearophile wrote:
>> Found through Reddit, similar things can be said about D2:
>> http://kirkwylie.blogspot.com/2011/01/scala-considered-harmful-for-large.html
>>
>
> I think that article is bunk.
>
> Large Java programs (as related to me by corporate Java programmers)
> tend to be excessively complex because the language is too simple.
>
> Too often people think that with a simple language, the programs created
> with it must be simple. This is dead wrong. Simple languages lead to
> complex, incomprehensible programs.

Oh, how true!

Think at Lisp, for instance, probably one of the most simple languages 
ever. This simplicity, precisely, forces to create tons of abstraction 
levels just to define notions not present in the language --due to 
simplicity-- but absolutely needed to escape too low-level programming. 
This is on the semantic side. On the syntactic one, all of these 
"custom" notions look the same, namely (doSomethingWith args...) (*) 
instead of each having a distinct outlook helping the reader & decode 
the code.
Great!
	(if (< IQ 150) findAnotherPL haveFunWithLISP)

On the other hand: which notions & distinctions should be defined in a 
language? D2 may have far too many in my opinion, but which ones should 
stay, and why?

Denis

(*) and if you're happy actual collection lists look like [e1 e2 e3], 
not (e1 e2 e3)
_________________
vita es estrany
spir.wikidot.com