[Russell91]

> When code is written only once and most of the cost comes afterward, that seems like an impossible choice to defend.

> I can't imagine how anyone working on large code bases with other people would want to do this. Yes, implicitness is more fun and beautiful at the beginning, but it becomes a nightmare after a short time for anyone other than the original coder.

Good points, it seems like the arguments for implicitness may have been stronger in the past, when programming languages were less developed. Think of RollerCoaster Tycoon being written almost entirely in assembly in '99 by a single programmer. You'd have plenty of incentive for implicit standards. When you have modern languages with well optimized abstractions, all that implicitness ends up losing out. But if you compare the total amount of work that went into, say, Rust, with the cost of a single dude just building an awesome game, you see that explicitness only wins when it gets to cheat and use way more resources. So yes, explicitness is always better in the limit, but when resources are more constrained, implicitness is so nimble it will just crush the competition.

[6Typos]

Excuse me, I'm a bit confused by your answer.

Are you saying that Assembly is more implicit than Rust or C++?

What do you use to measure "implicitness"?

[posterboy]

I'd interpret to mean that borrow checking for example can to be explicitly demanded in rust code, whereas in assembly a lot of the safety is manually assured and often enough only implicitly in the code.

> > Think of RollerCoaster Tycoon being written almost entirely in assembly in '99 by a single programmer. You'd have plenty of incentive for implicit standards

On the other hand you could say that it's the rust compiler source that is rather explicit about the mechanics and the game code would be explicit only by extension.