I had this post in gestation for a while but the recent post on SmartBear's blog ("Please stop saying Java sucks") decided it me to finalize and publish it.
I believe that it's a complete fallacy to equate "less code" with "better", this whether one is considering a language or a framework. In that matter (like in many others), I think the
Zen of Python provides the correct viewpoint:
Explicit is better than implicit
Why is this important? Here is a quote from Bob Martin's
Clean Code:
The ratio of time spent reading (code) versus writing is well over 10
to 1 ... (therefore) making it easy to read makes it easier to write.
I'm inclined to add that
not having any code to read at all hinders the capacity to reason about a piece of software, hence reduces the ability to work with it.
One could brush aside this argument and argue that if a programmer knew better language X or framework Y, he or she should now that this or that behaviour would implicitly apply in the considered context. I would then posit that
readability trumps knowledge.
Applications tend to last longer than fashionable tools, languages or frameworks. Long after the knowledge of the intimate details of whatever technology has been deemed useless and dumped into oblivion, someone will have to read the code and maintain it. This someone will appreciate to have the capacity to navigate all the aspects of the application by following explicit seams that bind them together.
When everything is implicit, an application code ends up like a novel where important points are pushed to footnotes, but without any reference to these footnotes. In that respect, I find Scala's implicits to be emblematic of a good approach to make code disappear and this because these implicits need to be explicitly used.
Coming back to SmartBear's post, old Java's code signal to noise ratio is the key problem. Things are getting better release after release: noise is decreasing and thus the ratio improves.
And that's the whole point of this post: throwing away the signal with the noise is not the solution. Code needs to be explicit so we can reason about it and so we can evolve it with confidence.
