Comment by bumblebird | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bumblebird | Hacker News Reader

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That is categorically NOT verbosity.

"public static void" has zero chance of containing errors. If you make a typo, it won't compile. It's not code, it's just "stuff". It doesn't translate to code. It doesn't "do" anything.

If you really can't learn to look past the "stuff" into the code, get your editor to hide it from you if you must.

Using "public static void" as an argument is almost as ridiculous as people who cite the lines of code needed to program HelloWorld.

Verbosity in a language should be measured in terms of actual code that does stuff. Not characters in source code.

For example, would you consider Basic with line numbers to be a verbose language since it has a number at the start of each line? Well no, because those numbers aren't code.

Another example:

Regexps are extremely terse and compact. Would you rather debug regexps, or java code? Which is easier to work with? Is it easier to make a mistake and introduce a bug in a regexp, or in java code?

The argument that less lines/characters = less bugs is not a good one.

"public static void" has zero chance of containing errors. If you make a typo, it won't compile. It's not code, it's just "stuff". It doesn't translate to code. It doesn't "do" anything.

It is verbosity. It's less harmful than some other instances because as you note it's extremely unlikely to cause bugs, but it's still noise that detracts from readability by obscuring the code that's actually relevant to the task at hand.

Would you rather debug regexps, or java code? Which is easier to work with?

If the regexp is expressing a concept that would otherwise take 20 lines of ad-hoc string processing in Java, I'll take the regexp.

That's why I said "Agree to disagree".

If I'm looking at code, the "public static void" doesn't detract from readability at all. I would much rather see "public static void" than some new 'less verbose' &$%||foo|| stuff I have to look up. I find it much easier to read words than characters.

It's a wonder anything works in some of these new 'unverbose' languages, where a 'concept' is a single character, and a single char typo can mean you've suddenly got a bug you have to go find.

    Verbose:
    1 : containing more words than necessary
      : wordy <a verbose reply>; also
      : impaired by wordiness <a verbose style>
    2 : given to wordiness <a verbose orator>

The word has a definition and you're either ignoring it to suit your point of view, or you don't know what it means.

If you want to argue that there are good kinds of verbosity and bad kinds that's fine, but don't try to make up your own definition and expect anyone to buy it.

In the realm of programming, I consider 'word' to mean a unit of code.

I agree though, it's perhaps not the best word to use.

Use what you enjoy using though. But please don't buy the FUD about verbosity.

The regular expression example makes no sense for me. A regexp is a very specialized way of express what a pattern must match, opossed to a java code that express how to perform the matching.

You don't regexp's compact syntax. That's fine. You would have a point if you say that its more readable, let's say:

   1: EXACT <a>(3)
   3: PLUS(15)
   4:   ANYOF[ab](0)
  15: OPEN1(17)
  17:   EXACT <cd>(19)
  19:   CURLY {0,1}(23)
  21:     EXACT <s>(0)
  23: CLOSE1(25)
  25: END(0)

than

/a[ab]+(cds?)/

but it's much easier to introduce a bug in 20 lines of Java code that deals with an ad-hoc parsing than in a regexp, specially if you have to change the pattern.

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