Patronizing Language Design?

[bearophile]

Walter Bright:
> What are your experiences?<

Michael Feathers is talking about Ruby; in the Python community there's even a say about this subject: "We are all consenting adults". It means that you usually don't need private class attributes, you can just put an underscore (or even two, for name mangling) before the name of class attributes that are private, it means "don't mess with those, or do it at your own risk". Usually this is enough.


Michael Feathers says something quite important here:
>The additional price is a decreased sense of responsibility and ownership.<

Human behavior isn't set in stone, it changes and adapts itself to the situation. Even intelligence changes according to the ambient. So if you put a programmer in an anonymous box inside a noisy Open Space, then you give such programmer a very precise list of things to program plus a bondage&discipline language like Java, such programmer will behave in certain ways. If you give such programmer some responsibilities, some space to learn and try things in a more flexible language, you will see a different behavior. Probably you will see the first programmer be less intelligent than the second one. Such psychological things are important, and often ignored.

Bye,
bearophile