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Comment by founderling | Hacker News Reader

I love programming languages. And I love to reason about them. When I see an article comparing languages, I'm all in.

So I clicked on this one. Started skimming through it, looking for code. Found none. Came back here to share my disappointment.

I'm always confused about articles that talk about code and have little code to show. Are there programmers who enjoy reading them? Or are these articles made for non-programmers?

Another thing that always throws me off is fluff. The article starts with "Choosing a programming language isn’t easy.". What does this add to the article? It immediately makes me think the author stuffed this article for no reason. So I have to skim even faster to not being cheated of my time. Is there anybody out there who thinks having the article prefixed with "Choosing a programming language isn’t easy." makes it more valuable?

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This article deals with "big picture" aspects, not specific syntactic details, so there is no reason for it to include code.

Backward compatibility, compilation speed, circular dependencies, small vs big specs, etc. What code do you want to show about these aspects?

> The article starts with "Choosing a programming language isn’t easy.". What does this add to the article?

It's an introduction. It's a very common writing technique. You don't start with the core content of the article, you start with a paragraph or a sentence about why you wrote the article in the first place. You did the same with you "I love programming language" opening.

    Backward compatibility, compilation speed,
    circular dependencies, small vs big specs,
    etc. What code do you want to show about
    these aspects?

Code that shows these aspects. What broke in Java because of language changes and why. How handling circular dependencies in one language makes code uglier then in the other. Examples of the specs.

    You did the same with you "I love
    programming language" opening.

That I love programming languages and to reason about them is an information about myself that the reader does not know in advance. That choosing a programming language is not easy is public knowledge that the readers already know. At least if they are programmers.

That is the point of my post. Asking who the target audience is. And how it is different from myself.

Please do not use code formatting for quotations. Use the old de facto standard of a “> ” prefix.

    Please do not use code formatting for quotations.

Why not? I think it looks pretty good.

Code formatting is difficult to read on mobile because the text doesn't wrap properly. You end up having to scroll horizontally to read it all.

FWIW, not only on mobile.

>That choosing a programming language is not easy is public knowledge that the readers already know. At least if they are programmers.

Well that bit is certainly not true; passing by certain communities and you’ll be let known theres only one good answer: {lisp,c#,haskell,rust,js,c/++}

> What code do you want to show about these aspects?

If not code, how do you prove these assertions? How do you measure them?

> It's an introduction.

Inappropriate for an analytical argument. Common for infotainment (entertainment masquerading as information).

> This article deals with "big picture" aspects

Read: It's a rant and/or PR.

If you think that somebody writing a 6-word sentence at the start of an article to set the tone is "cheating you of your time", perhaps stop reading random articles on the internet, and then also leaving comments about them.

Aren’t you being a bit uncharitable?

- The article focuses on the properties of codebases, not individual code snippets. While it would be very valuable to do compare the properties of entire codebases, that is demanding on both the reader and the author.

- Opening the article with a statement like “Choosing a programming language is never easy...” is an acknowledgement of the fact that he is not claiming Go is unequivocally the best in all scenarios. The author is signaling that he is a reasonable person, and while that may seem like fluff it is a necessary component of communicating with a wide audience.

There is little code in the main article, but there is a link to a detailed Java vs. Go code comparison: https://yourbasic.org/golang/go-vs-java/

That’s a bit of a straw man. 1. You are using go’s built in imaginary type, and writing one from scratch in Java. 2. That is no longer idiomatic Java. Use Autovalue and the comparison is a little more fair. The LOC and complexity still come out in go’s favor for this, no doubt. 3. Beating down on Java is fun, but with Kotlin interop and adoption rate, I think the comparison will become JVM vs X.

I think you are misunderstanding the linked code. The imaginary type in the Go case is not build in.

That is true.

Programmers enjoy writing them and then have flamewars about the topic. But reading? probably not so much...

He even names examples he is comparing but the examples are not there; there are many links in there and I am not going to click them all... So why are those examples not there?

Yeah but I think for non-trivial programs, say 10k+ lines of code, it's really difficult to show proper examples, not to speak of exhaustive coverage. Go in particular doesn't have many fancy language constructs and a lot of well written code in Go 1 might look a bit repetitive, especially the error handling. But once you wrote a larger program and followed best practices with error handling, you might be delighted how much more compact error messages are and still offer a lot of greppable things to debug after.

Probably there are languages that have a really expressive syntax that solve problems also in a scalable manner. For instance Python with its list comprehension that are a real code and time saver for software that does a lot with lists. (No coincidence it's so popular with ML.)

In ML you really want to use Numpy ndarrays, Pandas dataframes or Tensors.

A list is much too slow because:

- Not contiguous - No SIMD vectorization - No parallel processing

Lists are mostly used for list of containers (for example storing the arrays inputs of a function)

But it gives a lot of references to codes

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