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Comment by sethammons | Hacker News Reader

Congrats, you just inherited this code and have to fix it:

    Mercury 0.378,2439.7,3.3e23,57910000,88,0.0000000001,0,false

There is no way to infer what any of the values are. They are practically magic numbers. How do you know if you swapped a pair of numbers there and what that will do to the application? You have to mentally map all those things.

It is vastly, overwhelmingly more new-dev friendly to use:

    MERCURY: Planet{
  planet:              mercury,
  Gravity:             0.378,
  RadiusKm:            2439.7,
  MassKg:              3.3e23,
  OrbitKm:             57910000,
  OrbitDays:           88,
  SurfacePressureBars: 0.0000000001,
  Moons:               0,
  Rings:               false,
 },

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I’m wondering why we don’t use any type and definition-aware IDEs that could render the first line as a proper table (especially once there is a list of items of the same type involved). With headers and aligned fields. Similar to how Word would do it with inline tables.

Ideally of course with a switch to change to the second, more verbose definition.

Rider (and probably all JetBrains IDEs?) have inlined parameter names and types as hints.

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/rider/Inline_Parameter_Name_H...

That would tie languages to language tools and IMO be a downgrade from having a slightly more verbose language that is independent of tooling.

Maybe this data should be stored in a CSV and edited in Google Sheets/Excel.

I've got a job for you, mine at my previous company!

the values are specified in the definition of the iota type.

``` type planet int // Gravity[float64],RadiusKm[float64],MassKg[float64],OrbitKm[float64],OrbitDays[float64],SurfacePressureBars[float64],Moons[int],Rings[bool] ```

yeah, and now, mentally count how many values you are in, don't lose count now! Why offload that to your brain where you could miscount instead of using structured data?

Because your whole argument is misconstructed. There are cases where longer code is better, but there are many cases where longer is worse too. Because the tools the language provide, on top of being more succint, make the intent more obvious.

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