[wycats]

Since this thread is somewhat rehashing the old arguments ("you write once, but read many times, therefore EIBTI"), it might be worth reading a more modern take on the topic by Aaron Turon of the Rust core team in his essay about the Rust language ergonomics initiative[1].

> But this, in my opinion, is a misdiagnosis of the problem, one that throws out the baby with the bathwater. The root issue is instead: how much information do you need to confidently understand what a particular line of code is doing, and how hard is that information to find? Let’s call this the reasoning footprint for a piece of code. The pitfalls above come from the reasoning footprint getting out of hand, rather than implicitness per se.

> Does readability then demand that we minimize the reasoning footprint? I don’t think so: make it too small, and code becomes hopelessly verbose, making it difficult to read by forcing too much information into view at all times. What we want is a sweet spot, where routine or easy to find details can be left out, but relevant or surprising information is kept front and center.

[1]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/03/02/lang-ergonomics.html

[hyperpape]

Thanks for linking to this example. It's a great example of getting beyond slogans and trying to suss out the actual tradeoffs that come up in practice.