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digitalmars.D - Article on programming language adoption (x-post from /r/programming)

reply "John Colvin" <john.loughran.colvin gmail.com> writes:
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~lmeyerov/projects/socioplt/papers/adoptquant.pdf
Aug 01 2013
parent reply "Dicebot" <public dicebot.lv> writes:
 They see more value in unit


tests than types, both overall and as a debugging aid. Fur-
thermore, how features are presented strongly influences
developer feelings about them, such as prioritizing class in-
terfaces much higher than static types

Stop the world, I want to get out!
Aug 01 2013
next sibling parent "bearophile" <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:
Dicebot:


 Stop the world, I want to get out!


The article linked by John Colvin is not much interesting.

Regarding that comment about unit testing and types there could 
be several explanations, like:
- For their kind of coding static typing is not that needed/good.
- They only have experience with languages with inflexible static 
typing.
- Dynamic typing plus many unittests is "good enough" for certain 
coding purposes.

Eventually I think the most used languages will grow a flexible 
type system, gradual typing, and we'll see the dynamic and static 
typing mix so much that the discussion will become mostly 

TypeScript, and so on.

Bye.
bearophile
Aug 01 2013
prev sibling next sibling parent reply "Chris" <wendlec tcd.ie> writes:
On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 13:21:23 UTC, Dicebot wrote:

 They see more value in unit


 tests than types, both overall and as a debugging aid. Fur-
 thermore, how features are presented strongly influences
 developer feelings about them, such as prioritizing class in-
 terfaces much higher than static types

 Stop the world, I want to get out!


"We found that developers gener-
ally value expressiveness and speed of development over
language-enforced correctness."

I'll never understand why typing is regarded as such a big effort 
that slows down development. The terrible yoke of typing!
Aug 01 2013
next sibling parent "Meta" <jared771 gmail.com> writes:
On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 13:40:31 UTC, Chris wrote:

 "We found that developers gener-
 ally value expressiveness and speed of development over
 language-enforced correctness."

 I'll never understand why typing is regarded as such a big 
 effort that slows down development. The terrible yoke of typing!


Sounds to me like their study was limited to Silicon Valley web 
startups. I bet if the sample size was more diverse they'd get 
different results.
Aug 01 2013
prev sibling parent reply "Tofu Ninja" <emmons0 purdue.edu> writes:
On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 13:40:31 UTC, Chris wrote:

 On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 13:21:23 UTC, Dicebot wrote:

 They see more value in unit


 tests than types, both overall and as a debugging aid. Fur-
 thermore, how features are presented strongly influences
 developer feelings about them, such as prioritizing class in-
 terfaces much higher than static types

 Stop the world, I want to get out!


 "We found that developers gener-
 ally value expressiveness and speed of development over
 language-enforced correctness."

 I'll never understand why typing is regarded as such a big 
 effort that slows down development. The terrible yoke of typing!


I don't think its that people think typing is bad, I think its 
that people don't like unnecessary typing, as typing is the main 
interface between us and our program its obvious that we would 
want that interface to be as efficient as possible.

Personally that is why I came to D, because it was easier to be 
more concise in it than in C++, not because of the amazing 
template system or the fast compile time or the safety, I found 
out about them after the fact. I came simply because I thought 
that C++'s syntax was bloated and ugly and that D's syntax was a 
bit cleaner and slimmed down.

Simple example, why would I want to type "node->next" when I 
could just type "node.next". On the surface its only one more 
character but in reality its the difference between pressing one 
key that you are used to pressing in every day typing(the period) 
or the combination of pressing a '-' then holding down the shift 
and pressing the '.' key, its made worse by the fact that the '-' 
and the '.' are so far away from each other.

When every you are trying to optimize for speed you need to 
always be aware of your bottle necks, for streaming video its 
internet speed, for a CUDA application its main memory, for 
coding its they keyboard.
Aug 01 2013
next sibling parent reply "Chris" <wendlec tcd.ie> writes:
On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 15:01:39 UTC, Tofu Ninja wrote:

 On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 13:40:31 UTC, Chris wrote:

 On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 13:21:23 UTC, Dicebot wrote:

 They see more value in unit


 tests than types, both overall and as a debugging aid. Fur-
 thermore, how features are presented strongly influences
 developer feelings about them, such as prioritizing class in-
 terfaces much higher than static types

 Stop the world, I want to get out!


 "We found that developers gener-
 ally value expressiveness and speed of development over
 language-enforced correctness."

 I'll never understand why typing is regarded as such a big 
 effort that slows down development. The terrible yoke of 
 typing!


 I don't think its that people think typing is bad, I think its 
 that people don't like unnecessary typing, as typing is the 
 main interface between us and our program its obvious that we 
 would want that interface to be as efficient as possible.

 Personally that is why I came to D, because it was easier to be 
 more concise in it than in C++, not because of the amazing 
 template system or the fast compile time or the safety, I found 
 out about them after the fact. I came simply because I thought 
 that C++'s syntax was bloated and ugly and that D's syntax was 
 a bit cleaner and slimmed down.

 Simple example, why would I want to type "node->next" when I 
 could just type "node.next". On the surface its only one more 
 character but in reality its the difference between pressing 
 one key that you are used to pressing in every day typing(the 
 period) or the combination of pressing a '-' then holding down 
 the shift and pressing the '.' key, its made worse by the fact 
 that the '-' and the '.' are so far away from each other.

 When every you are trying to optimize for speed you need to 
 always be aware of your bottle necks, for streaming video its 
 internet speed, for a CUDA application its main memory, for 
 coding its they keyboard.


I think they meant typing as in "strong/weak typing"

string text;
text = "Hello!";

as opposed to

text = "Hello"
var text = "Hello"

Dynamic typing, although it saves a few keystrokes, can introduce 
some subtle bugs.

I think D's auto keyword for obvious cases is pretty good.
Aug 01 2013
parent "Tofu Ninja" <emmons0 purdue.edu> writes:
On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 15:12:19 UTC, Chris wrote:

 On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 15:01:39 UTC, Tofu Ninja wrote:

 On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 13:40:31 UTC, Chris wrote:

 On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 13:21:23 UTC, Dicebot wrote:

 They see more value in unit


 tests than types, both overall and as a debugging aid. Fur-
 thermore, how features are presented strongly influences
 developer feelings about them, such as prioritizing class in-
 terfaces much higher than static types

 Stop the world, I want to get out!


 "We found that developers gener-
 ally value expressiveness and speed of development over
 language-enforced correctness."

 I'll never understand why typing is regarded as such a big 
 effort that slows down development. The terrible yoke of 
 typing!


 I don't think its that people think typing is bad, I think its 
 that people don't like unnecessary typing, as typing is the 
 main interface between us and our program its obvious that we 
 would want that interface to be as efficient as possible.

 Personally that is why I came to D, because it was easier to 
 be more concise in it than in C++, not because of the amazing 
 template system or the fast compile time or the safety, I 
 found out about them after the fact. I came simply because I 
 thought that C++'s syntax was bloated and ugly and that D's 
 syntax was a bit cleaner and slimmed down.

 Simple example, why would I want to type "node->next" when I 
 could just type "node.next". On the surface its only one more 
 character but in reality its the difference between pressing 
 one key that you are used to pressing in every day typing(the 
 period) or the combination of pressing a '-' then holding down 
 the shift and pressing the '.' key, its made worse by the fact 
 that the '-' and the '.' are so far away from each other.

 When every you are trying to optimize for speed you need to 
 always be aware of your bottle necks, for streaming video its 
 internet speed, for a CUDA application its main memory, for 
 coding its they keyboard.


 I think they meant typing as in "strong/weak typing"

 string text;
 text = "Hello!";

 as opposed to

 text = "Hello"
 var text = "Hello"

 Dynamic typing, although it saves a few keystrokes, can 
 introduce some subtle bugs.

 I think D's auto keyword for obvious cases is pretty good.


Now that you said that, you comment makes more sense to me(I was 
wondering why you liked to type so much :/)... I agree with you 
that I don't really see why people make a big deal about it, but 
it can be annoying and repetitive to do something like...

someClassNameThatIsReallyLong x = new 
someClassNameThatIsReallyLong();

But as you said, auto is a good solution to that...

I think it still comes back to my main point from before, the 
redundancy is not necessary. Unnecessary typing = bad in most 
peoples minds.
Aug 01 2013
prev sibling next sibling parent reply "Dicebot" <public dicebot.lv> writes:
On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 15:01:39 UTC, Tofu Ninja wrote:

 When every you are trying to optimize for speed you need to 
 always be aware of your bottle necks, for streaming video its 
 internet speed, for a CUDA application its main memory, for 
 coding its they keyboard.


I don't buy it. In a daily programming actually writing code 
takes no more than 10% of time for me. 30% planning what needs to 
be done, 30% figuring out what some piece of code does, 30% 
debugging. Even full elimination of typing phase (literally, 
imagine some magic tool that directly translate your thoughts to 
code) wont be as useful as something that halves time for _any_ 
of three other parts. And static strong typing helps them all. As 
well as any compile-verifiable correctness.

People that have bottlenecks in actually writing code must be 
genius and never make mistakes.
Aug 01 2013
parent "Tofu Ninja" <emmons0 purdue.edu> writes:
On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 15:39:25 UTC, Dicebot wrote:

 On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 15:01:39 UTC, Tofu Ninja wrote:

 When every you are trying to optimize for speed you need to 
 always be aware of your bottle necks, for streaming video its 
 internet speed, for a CUDA application its main memory, for 
 coding its they keyboard.


 I don't buy it. In a daily programming actually writing code 
 takes no more than 10% of time for me. 30% planning what needs 
 to be done, 30% figuring out what some piece of code does, 30% 
 debugging. Even full elimination of typing phase (literally, 
 imagine some magic tool that directly translate your thoughts 
 to code) wont be as useful as something that halves time for 
 _any_ of three other parts. And static strong typing helps them 
 all. As well as any compile-verifiable correctness.

 People that have bottlenecks in actually writing code must be 
 genius and never make mistakes.


That is why I chose to say that it was a bottleneck in coding, 
not in development. The amount of text required to code something 
has effects on the things you mentioned, for instance having a 
more verbose language can help prevent errors by making the 
writer think about every thing he is writing, but can also cause 
more errors as more code means more places for miss types.

Text amount can also effect code comprehension. For instance, 
having a very wordy language can sometimes be hard to understand 
as it is simply more for your brain to process. On the other hand 
a very compact language can be hard to understand as their might 
be to many assumptions and implicit information that the reader 
my not have. Debugging kind of falls in this as well as it 
requires you to fully comprehend what is going on to be able to 
find the bug.

As for planing, I generally feel that this is much more language 
agnostic(or maybe I should say syntax agnostic?) The only times 
the specific language helps me plan is if their is some really 
nifty feature that makes what I am trying to do much more 
simple(like mixins or the simplicity of templates in D).
Aug 01 2013
prev sibling next sibling parent =?UTF-8?B?QWxpIMOHZWhyZWxp?= <acehreli yahoo.com> writes:
On 08/01/2013 08:01 AM, Tofu Ninja wrote:


 Simple example, why would I want to type "node->next" when I could just
 type "node.next".


However, that distinction allows accessing members of the pointer versus 
the members of the pointee. (Imagine 'node' is a type that overloads 
operator-> like smart pointers do.)

On the other hand, D's reference semantics make the distinction 
disappear for classes. But then there is the inconvenience of not being 
able to access the class variable versus the class object at least for 
some operations:

   auto o = new MyClass();

While almost everything else that is accessed by the dot operator is 
applied to the object, o.sizeof is applied to the variable. One thing to 
keep in mind...

Ali
Aug 01 2013
prev sibling parent Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:
On 8/1/2013 8:01 AM, Tofu Ninja wrote:

 Simple example, why would I want to type "node->next" when I could just type
 "node.next".


The real problem with node->next as opposed to node.next is if node changes
from 
being a reference type to being a value type - then you've got to edit every 
dang use of it.

C++ also uses :: instead of .
Aug 01 2013
prev sibling parent Gambler <fake feather.org.ru> writes:
On 8/1/2013 9:21 AM, Dicebot wrote:

 They see more value in unit


 tests than types, both overall and as a debugging aid. Fur-
 thermore, how features are presented strongly influences
 developer feelings about them, such as prioritizing class in-
 terfaces much higher than static types
 
 Stop the world, I want to get out!


This does not surprise me. TDD has been sold as One True Way of
programming for decades now. A lot of modern developers just throw the
code (and tests, which are also code) at the problem until it seems
solved. Using type system or declarative functional programming to
eliminate certain errors is often not considered during development.
Aug 05 2013