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Comment by silisili

If there's one thing I've learned on the topic in my life and career, it's that everything written should be written for the reader, not the writer. Perl, C, and C++ are very much for the writer. To some extent, Rust also.

Python and Go are good for the reader. These aren't exhaustive lists, just what I'm familiar with. Admittedly, Python is tricky because it looks simple(boring) at first glance, but lets one use a lot of magic.

My daughter is learning cursive and it just reminded me how much I blasted hate it. I can write it fine, reading it is a tossup. It's solely a shortcut for the writer, at the expense of reading. But anything of importance is read thousands or millions more times than it's written.

In programming especially, the easier to read the better, no matter how verbose and boring the language. I think we'll get there, when we all quit pretending we're too clever to write that way.

parent silisili 5 years ago

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