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by heretoo 2985 days ago
If it is five lines of code vs. one line of code, and we believe that the number of bugs is proportional to the number of lines of code, irrespective of which language we are programming in, then this would be an obvious benefit.

And it isn't four lines saved, but four lines times the number of uses in the entire code base.
2 comments
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 2985 days ago
> we believe that the number of bugs is proportional to the number of lines of code

Why would you believe that?

And if you do believe that why don't you use a code golfing language?

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always_good 2985 days ago
What exactly are you contributing by taking what they said to the extreme?

Should someone now have to point out to you that a million-line function is worse than a ten-line function for calculating fizzbuzz? Is that meaningful discourse in your book?

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XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 2984 days ago
My response seems to have upset you. I'm sorry that happened.

In general I believe that number of lines of code is correlated with number of bugs, but I would hesitate to say that it is proportional to. Going in with the explicit goal of reducing the number of lines could easily lead to more bugs, not less.

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mgoetzke 2984 days ago
I would agree, BUT code needs to be readable first. The proposed syntax applied to e.g switch would have just braces which would not look very readable.

Having less lines can make extremely unreadable code. Readable code with an error is easy to fix, unreadable code is not.

At the very least the ambiguity of doing TWO things (matching AND destructuring) should not be allowed since it changes the outcome based on whether a value is a literal or a variable with the exact same literal assigned to it (at least that's how I understand it from reading the examples)

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