Language flexibility doesn't obscure the readability of code. It enhances it. In a flexible language, unclear code is always programmer error, and programmer error is fixable. In an inflexible language, a lack of clarity can sometimes be unavoidable (e.g. java programmers forced to shoehorn everything into classes)
I don't find it shocking, I think it's a sign of immaturity. Been there, done that.
> Language flexibility doesn't obscure the readability of code. It enhances it.
Given a language without any sorts of constraints, any program can and will be written in any conceivable style.
In design - not just programming language design - constraints are generally a good thing.
> In a flexible language, unclear code is always programmer error, and programmer error is fixable.
Virtually all errors are fixable in principle. In practice, there's a budget. Your clever and elegant but utterly idiosyncratic abstractions are costing me money in terms of getting people onboarded.
> In an inflexible language, a lack of clarity can sometimes be unavoidable (e.g. java programmers forced to shoehorn everything into classes)
This is not a bad trade-off at all.
A flexible language invites architecture astronauts to re-invent the concept of classes or modules over and over in slightly different ways. That's Javascript until ES6 and we're still suffering from it.
The best example of that in programming language design I have seen is the V programming language. (https://vlang.io)
No global variables, no null/undefined/nil/None/... V is the only language I know in which variable shadowing is an error. (Do you know any other language with this feature/constraint?)
And then I remember the handling of ''var''s in js and hoisting etc. ... sigh!
gcc -Werror=shadow
$ gcc -Werror=shadow -x c -
void foo(int x) { { int x; } }
[Ctrl-D][Enter]
<stdin>: In function ‘foo’:
<stdin>:1:25: error: declaration of ‘x’ shadows a parameter [-Werror=shadow]
<stdin>:1:14: note: shadowed declaration is here
cc1: some warnings being treated as errorsI did not dare to open the gcc man page, now I think I will look at it.
For that constraint, one have to pass an option. I want to know if any language (other than V) which has this as default.