I should be focusing on a high-level description of the problem, and the compiler should be filling in as much of the solution as it possibly can. My brain is made of meat and will never get any faster, so this is the only way for the profession to progress.
The other way for the profession to progress is to eliminate humans (mostly) with self-programming machines (effectively, a technological singularity).
I disagree, it’s purely a count of newline characters per my original point (e.g., a third of the lines are just `}` or `]`).
> My issue with boilerplate is that we have lots of tools for generating it but no well-supported way to summarize it back to something human-readable
In my experience, it’s pretty easy to understand `if err != nil { return err }` and the like at a glance. Similarly a for loop that maps a `[]T` to a `[]U`.
I also dispute whether a long chain of .map().foldr().etc() is intrinsically more intuitive than a for loop, especially when the code needs to short circuit. Don’t get me wrong, I like using Rust-style iterator combinators in my hobby time, but it’s because they make me feel clever not because they are more readable than Go-style for loops.
TL;DR, I agree that our brains aren’t getting faster and that readability is important, I just don’t think newlines or the lackthereof are the measure of readability.
It's not simply that. Compare in golang:
var res int
if <some condition> {
res = foo()
} else {
res = bar()
}
let res = if <some condition> { foo() } else { bar() };
These things add up. Let alone how it takes dozens of lines of code in golang to implement what essentially is a sequence of map/filter/groupBy. The logic in languages that support the latter immediately stands out, whereas in golang you have to read it line by line to figure out what's going on.
What's ironic is that even with the proposal to add some of those to golang, they're still going to be vastly inferior to the implementations we have in Java/C#/Scala/etc. because they don't compose in golang, and are still going to be very awkward to read.