Comment by splinterofchaos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by splinterofchaos | Hacker News Reader

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splinterofchaos

> A language that is brief and concise gives you fewer opportunities to make mistakes

I don't think that's necessarily true. Look at brainfuck!

But in all seriousness, dynamically typed languages could be categorized as "more expressive" than statically typed languages, and generally allow for cleaner interfaces, but turns static-typing compile-time errors into dynamic run-time errors. What's worse is that your tests might not cover the specific conditions that cause it. So, while you might consider C++ less expressive and concise than Python, at least you'll never try to take the square root of a string.

The ease of writing bug-free code and debugging depends on a lot of factors. How well designed is the interface/API? How structured is the code? How good are the available tools? It's not what language you use, but /how/ you use it.

I'm not willing to say that dynamically typed languages are more expressive. It's hard to compare two languages and just say "A is more expressive than B." Usually they just express different things with different degrees of conciseness. (In particular, Brainfuck is not concise. It has a small grammar, but an equivalent print statement has much more room for error, since it takes a longer string of obfuscated code to produce.)

My point is that the _goal_ of expressiveness is still there and still valuable. We need languages that express our intent safely, clearly, and quickly. The better this is achieved, the less debugging you have to do -- because, by definition, the code will express what you want more clearly and with less room for error.

>It's not what language you use, but /how/ you use it.

How you use a language is determined by the grammar of that language. So I don't see any value in your point here, save for trying to dodge specificity and feign wisdom.

I agree with your skepticism of the idea that that dynamically typed languages are more expressive. It is not as if we are writing poetry here; we are actually trying to specify, with great accuracy, a virtual machine. Fortunately, we can state for sure that there is no fundamental difference between the capabilities of Turing-equivalence languages; if this were not the case, the arguments over expressiveness would be interminable.

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