[anamax]

That's nice, but how easy is it to understand those 2 pages of brilliance later and how brittle are they?

Remember - the author is the smartest person who will ever see a given piece of code. The reader, even if it's the same person, will be dumber.

Programming isn't literature or poetry. No one ever had to add a mail reader to"Ode to a Grecian Urn".

[silentbicycle]

If cutting out boilerplate to sharpen focus on the actual code doesn't help make it easier to understand, then something is seriously wrong.

Part of writing good code, whether two pages of brilliance or twenty of gradual brilliance, is conveying intent in the human-readable parts. The parser doesn't care if all the functions have names like doTheNextThing() or french_onion_soup, but it would be a slap in the face to any future maintainers.

Choosing informative names and separating a program along clear conceptual boundaries can be a greater aid to understanding than any syntactic redundancies. Well-placed comments help smooth things over, particularly notes on why a particular approach was chosen. The names themselves should be able to convey what is going on in most cases.

(For distilled wisdom along those lines, see _Thinking Forth_ by Leo Brodie, also online at http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/.)

[gaius]

I have that book, and I am a big fan of Forth.

It's not unusual now for some of my source files to be more comments than code, the comments explain my intent and the assumptions I have made.

I'm gonna call a function french_onion_soup tomorrow just for larks :-)

[silentbicycle]

For leeks, you mean. :)

The biggest thing I learned from Forth is that if I'm about to add a comment inside a function because something needs clarification, I should probably try breaking it out and thinking up a descriptive name instead.

[yariv]

I think it's a lot easier to understand what some code does if you don't have to read a lot of language imposed cruft that surrounds the actual 'meat' of the algorithm.

Erlang really is easier than Java -- both to read and to write. I think people too often confuse "different" with "difficult".

[anamax]

I wasn't thinking Java. I was thinking lisp or python.

[silentbicycle]

For one thing, the pattern matching used in Erlang, ML, and Haskell can be quite easy to read.

For example, something like

  let days_in_month m = match m with
    | Jan | Mar | May | Jul | Aug | Oct | Dec -> 31
    | Apr | Jun | Sept | Nov -> 30
    | Feb -> if leap_year () then 29 else 28

It takes a small amount of context (all "| Val" sections without a -> ... side match together), but it's a pretty direct correspondence.

[nostrademons]

That's not much harder in C or Java, given appropriate enum declarations:

  public int days_in_month(month) { 
    switch(month) {
       case JAN:
       case MAR:
       case MAY:
       case JUL:
       case AUG:
       case OCT:
       case DEC:
         return 31
       case APR:
       case JUN:
       case SEPT:
       case NOV:
         return 30;
       case FEB:
         if(leap_year()) return 29; else return 28;
     }
  } 

Pattern-matching really shines when you need to destructure the argument, then do something similar to the result regardless of which case resulted in the destructuring. For example, compare red-black trees written in Java:

http://www.docjar.com/html/api/java/util/TreeMap.java.html

vs. those written in Haskell:

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/data/RedBlackTree.html

The rebalancing code in Java is 80 lines long. The rebalancing code in Haskell is 6.

[silentbicycle]

I couldn't think of a better example at the time. Something that simultaneously matched several fields (whether destructured from one variable or not) and/or had guards would be a better example.

Maybe something like this (in pseudo-ML):

  (* Look up order code for a Sci-Fi GadgetTM, units are in cm *)
  let gadget_order_code width depth height color has_laser =
    match (width depth height color has_laser) =
       (* The original, simple code *)
      | 5, 2, 1, Red, true -> "ZAP-X"
       (* Most common width, color *)
      | 4, d, h, Blue, true -> sprintf "ZAP-4-%d%d+" (str d) (str h) "+"
       (* C for Custom Color *)
      | 4, d, h, c, false -> "ZAP-4C-%d%d-%c" (str d) (str h) (color_code c)
       (* Orange lasers are discontinued *)
      | w, d, h, c, true when (w + d + h) < 15 and c != Orange ->
         "ZAP-S-%d%d%d-%c" (str w) (str d) (str h) (color_code c)
      | _, _, _, _, _ -> failwith "Unavailable"

That's a little complicated to determine with pattern matching or via a database, but doing it in a series of nested if statements would get mind boggling.

[silentbicycle]

(oops. lost the sprintfs...)