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by Klonoar 1495 days ago
>when I revisit old mostly forgoten code, I love that boilerplate. I rarely have to do any puzzling about how to infer what from the current file, it's just all right there for me.

This is going to sound absurd, but the only other language I had this experience with was Objective-C.

Verbosity is super underrated in programming. When I need to come back to something long after the fact, yes, please give me every bit of information necessary to understand it.

3 comments

Useful verbosity is fine to me. However, I never wish to see another line of COBOL, thank you very much.
This is a really good point, IMO. I've never written extensive amounts of Objective-C, but in my adventures I've had to bolt together GUIs with Objective-C++ and I learned to love the "verbose" nature of Obj-C calls whenever I had to dive back into the editor for a game engine or whatever because it meant I didn't have to rebuild so much state in my head.
What you want is for the complex things to be verbose and the simple things to be concise.

Objective-C makes everything verbose. It’s too far in the other direction. Memories of stringByAppendingString

Eh, sure, I'm willing to buy Objective-C went too far in some places. It still works for coming back to, though. :)