[Buttons840]

The first developer I ever worked with was very explicit, and I learned some important lessons from him. He had created a system in PHP that controlled printers and it was very explicit. He didn't know what a function was, his code had no functions. It was a 5000 line script that would run on a Windows timer, top to bottom. In some places the control structures were nested 17 deep, I counted; an if-statement inside an if-statement inside a while-loop inside a for-loop inside an if-statement inside a for-loop inside an if-statement, etc, 17 deep. The cyclomatic complexity was in the thousands.

I never could understand that code. I know it wasn't brief, does that mean it was explicit?

I think the truth is brevity and explicitness are orthogonal. Let me ask you this: can code be both brief and explicit? What would that look like?

[mckn1ght]

I’m not sure brevity and explicitness are totally orthogonal, explicit sort of implies spelling things out in a longer way. That doesn’t mean that something that is long is thorough, however.

I like the tradeoff the Swiftlang project talks much about: brevity vs clarity (because explicit doesn’t necessarily mean clear, either, as your example shows). I think those are more orthogonal concerns, both important to think about, for different reasons that may often compete.