| Has anyone studied open plan offices and choice of programming language? Does an environment with a high chance of interruption lead to languages where you have to write a lot to do a small task, because you can write simple code between interruptions, and over time get enough code to do the task - and if you get interrupted well you only lose one minute's thinking. Contrast with a powerful language where you need half an hour of thinking to build an intricate machine in your head, then you write it down in a little code, and need to hold its workings in mind while you test it. With no long spans of concentration you won't go slower or write half an intricate mechanism, you will write nothing. Or to put it another way, is the problem of working in an open plan office: you aren't choosing the right tools and work pattern for your environment? Or to put it another way: are enterprise languages 'blub' languages because they come from big offices and academic languages 'powerful and terse' because they come from people with time and quiet for deep thought. Or another way: could we redesign our languages, tools and their UI to make us as effective, and feel as good, in open plan offices, like f.lux changes a screen for night use instead of complaining that it's not daytime. |
That's not a powerful language, it's a bad language.
A powerful language isn't one that's overly concise to the point of crypticness, it's one that allows you to express yourself naturally. Meaning, there is a clean and strong conceptual mapping between the code and the problem domain. Meaning, it requires less mental effort to use.