Hacker News Reader

style that increases average error rate

Errors per LOC is allegedly constant, across all languages.

I also consider the cost of change when designing things.

I once created an HL7 wrapper that was a marvelous thing of beauty. Fluent API, clever use of the type system. But no one could maintain it, including me. It had too much magic. So I scrapped it, went with a dumber implementation.

View on HN

> Errors per LOC is allegedly constant, across all languages.

If this is true, then a more verbose style will have a higher error rate. (more LOC to do the same task -> more errors)

> Errors per LOC is allegedly constant, across all languages.

This implies that more expressive languages(more expressions per line) are less prone to errors.

You conclusion would be correct if he had stated that error per expression was constant between languages.

Don't confuse correlation with causation. It may not be that more lines is the cause, but that the method of thinking that some languages require you to think in is error prone, and it just so happens that such a language also needs more LoC.

>>Errors per LOC is allegedly constant > then a more verbose style will have a higher error rate.

I think that's what he means.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com