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Comment by erik_seaberg | Hacker News Reader

Learning curves bring payoffs. It's most important that an expert can quickly make changes that are obviously correct, concise, and performant to the other experts.

Quickly onboarding novices is only helpful for throwaway work or teams with retention problems. Their work inherently needs more scrutiny until they become experts.

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Experts take a long time to make. Few stay on any project long enough that the investment pays off. It's more important to ramp new developers up quickly than to empower experts.

Those projects are doomed and I would urge anyone not to spend much of his career trying to delay the collapse.

I say that as a member of a team whose median tenure (three years ten months) is short enough to concern me a little.

> Those projects are doomed

Based on my experience those projects are 99% of all projects in commercial organizations. So, emphatically no.

Is typing `combine(t1, t2)` instead of `t1 + t2` the largest issue your experts have to productivity? Most folks complain about a variety of factors beyond typing speed.

I picked up Lisp early on, and don’t care that much about t1 + t2 vs. (+ t1 t2) vs. t1.add(t2). But without method overloading and generics, changing the static type of anything requires editing everything.

Good points.

I accidentally replied to yours. I had intended to reply to preseinger.

Well for math matrix formulas it gets difficult to read. Like (A+B)/2 *C*(A-B)/2 is better than mulMat(skalardivide(addMat(A, B), 2),mulMat(C,skalardivide(subMat(A,B),2)))

Definitely not.

The former is in general preferable to the latter, though, because it makes it a little more clear that arbitrary computation is occurring.

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