Evan Laforge wrote:
I used to get annoyed about all the java boilerplate and awkwardness. But then I learned that if I relax and stop thinking so much about the aesthetics of what I'm writing, I can just let my fingers go on typing without having to think too much.
:-) A good Java IDE will write most of the boilerplate, too. I find the most annoying thing is not *writing* the boilerplate, it's the fact that it clutters things up and makes it hard to see what is going on.
Ultimately the problems to be solved are the same, it's just that java and c++ give you a lot of padding where you're writing boilerplate and workarounds for not having closures, monadic values, a nice type system, etc.
One thing I'm curious about is Haskell versus Python or Ruby. Code in those languages is, IMO, prone to type related bugs because there is no compile-time checking. On the other hand, I would expect the 'density' of the code to be similar to Haskell. You can do a lot of the same things, although they support an OO programming style too. Interestingly, the Shootout benchmarks show Haskell doing quite poorly on code size. I suspect that is because a lot of effort has gone into making those programs fast at the expense of everything else, though. Pete