Carmack about static analysis

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 09/02/2012 22:34, bearophile wrote:
> Comparing languages with small code snippets doesn't tell you all you want to know about how a language scales for very large programs, of course, so they aren't enough. But such small snippets are very useful any way because large programs are mostly made of small parts; and it's still true that being able to remove one line from a group of 4 lines sometimes means reducing the size of a large program by 10% or more. So little syntax niceties matter even for huge programs. This is also why (as example) Python list comps are very useful for programs one million lines of code long too.

Yeah, I'm not saying comparing small snippets is not useful... Clear it 
is, I mean, it's not practical to write a full application just to 
compare languages, obviously. Rather it's the mindset when examining 
such snippets that is important: one should be thinking of the impact 
the language has not just on code like the snippet, but on a 
medium-large sized code as well (and code written by multiple people). 
And I've seen several sites and discussions where such a mindset is 
completely ignored... (like people dissing the fact that in Java you 
can't write a function outside a class, you have to use a static method, 
and thus have a class wrapping it around...)


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer