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matt2000 | 4 years ago

None of these feel particularly true to me, but in particular "less code is more readable" is just so clearly not true. If this was the case we'd all still be using Perl.

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klyrs|4 years ago

I see some truth to this, under a more reasonable interpretation. Clearly, well-golfed k/j/q/apl isn't doing the reader any favors. On the other hand, unnecessarily verbose code can be just as tortuous as unnecessarily terse code. And when you're comparing apples to apples (e.g. same algorithm, same data structures), shorter code is somewhat correlated to better performance.

In terms of developer productivity, less code faster to write and faster to read. To a point. The sweet spot is the shortest code that's still easy to read & write.

mst|4 years ago

That's not even true in Perl.

However "less conceptually complex code is often easier to reason about' is absolutely true and it takes most people a fair amount of practice (and at least if you're me, a lot of wondering why your foot suddenly has a hole in it) to properly appreciate the difference between "less conceptually complex" and "less".