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Comment by nauticacom | Hacker News Reader

It's a spectrum, though. A language can be between 0 expressiveness (Go) and 100 expressiveness (Perl, maybe Lisps), and claiming that the only way to avoid the mysterious evil team member who will wreck your codebase is to patronizingly limit them "for their own sake" is insulting

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Often times the developers moaning about complex code basically learned if statements and for loops and then were done learning.

But we still have to write code that these people understand. It makes no damn sense.

Sometimes, sure, people write horribly complex code, but sometimes it's just developers who have stopped learning. They see something that isn't immediately familiar and discard it as too complex and make no attempt at trying to learn.

What I don't get is why we have to pander to these people.

This is a mischaracterization. We write simple code not for simple people, but because grokking gratuitously abstract code isn't a good use of anyone's cognitive resources--no matter how smart you are, you will have more mental capacity to put toward real problems if you're working in a simple codebase rather than an unnecessarily abstract codebase.

Not for their sake - for mine. I avoid people and places that make my life unnecessarily difficult, especially if I have to do support and can be called at 3am to resolve urgent issues.

My needs are pretty basic: I like code that is easy to understand and easy to change more than writing code that leaves a smug smile on my face. I read more code than I write, so YMMV.

The fewer surprises, the better for me, and so far, the collaborative codebases I've encountered the least number of surprises have consistently been in Go (the other languages I've been paid to work with are Javascript, Perl, Python, Java, and Scala).

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