Re: Clause "with and use"

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

I understand what you're saying and I agree that one might find some 
help from fields such as psychology or medicine to help explain what 
sorts of perceptions people have. But consider this: The article in 
question (and we Ada-ites, for that matter - and to bring it back on 
topic) are making a claim about software productivity. We are 
deliberately making language design decisions on the assumption that 
clarity = verbosity and the basis that clarity at the expense of brevity 
  makes software development more productive. Is there any demonstration 
of that or is it just a guess?

For example, there are lots of hackers out there who really love cryptic 
C code and the language was designed to support crypticism (Do I get 
credit for inventing that word? ;-) *They* claim this makes them more 
productive once they have gained the expertise in understanding the 
implications of all the cool, short little operators. Are they more 
productive? What if we're talking about code that is built once and 
lives for a very short time or is otherwise never modified? Would Ada's 
verbosity and long lifecycle support help here?

All of that is a big unknown and it isn't intuitively obvious to *all* 
of the casual observers that the claim is true on the face of it. There 
have been some reasonably scientific comparisons of Ada and C with some 
measuring of productivity that ends up showing Ada to be a clear winner. 
But a lot of factors go into that. Is the avoidance of crypticism part 
of it? Probably. But it would help if there was some evidence to support 
that claim.

MDC


Preben Randhol wrote:
> On 2003-11-04, Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com> wrote:
> 
> Sure data are nice and I haven't read the article. However, it has little
> to do with computer science. This is study of the human brain and
> perception. So comparing it to microchips is not very interesting I
> think. However, I find that if I read a book that is well written and
> clear on a subject it is easier and faster to comprehend the content.
> For a book which uses a lot of implicit rules and theories it takes
> longer to graph the content.
> 
> I remember when I was a student that some of the books were a nightmare
> as it did:
> 
>       From eq (1) we have
> 
>       equation (1)
> 
>       this gives eq:
> 
>       equation (2)
> 
> where (1) and (2) had a lot of implicit calculations etc...
> 
> while it could be written of explained on the blackboards as:
> 
>       equation (1)
>       equation (1.1)
>       equation (1.2)
>       equation (1.3)
>       equation (1.4)
>       equation (1.5)
> 
> and then finally
> 
>       equation (2)
> 
> However, in which of the two cases you learn more can be debated. It can
> be said that in the first case, if you take your time, you will
> probably learn better by doing all the implied calculations. On the
> other hand it can also be said that it is not likely that on do take the
> time / have the time to one would learn more by looking over the
> calculations between (1) and (2) and understand the progress.
> 
> I'm sure that there are studies on this, but that you have to look
> outside your field for them.
> 
> Consider:
> 
> [1.1]
> 
>    if calc_value (some_arg) = True then
>       --
>    else
>       --
>    end if;
> 
> to
> 
> [1.2]
> 
>    if calc_value (some_arg) then
>       --
>    else
>       --
>    end if;
> 
> or
> 
> [2.1]
> 
>    if done = ture then
>       --
>    end if;
> 
> to
> 
> [2.2]
> 
>    if done then
>       --
>    end if;
> 
> I would say that in some cases [1.1] be more readable
> that [1.2], but that [2.2] is more readable than [2.1]
> 
> [3.1]
> 
>    if not calc_value (some_arg) then
> 
> [3.2]
> 
>    if calc_value (some_arg) = False then
> 
> And I would say [3.2] is much more readable than [3.1].
> 
> 
> 
> 


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Marin David Condic
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     "So if I understand 'The Matrix Reloaded' correctly, the Matrix is
     basically a Microsoft operating system - it runs for a while and
     then crashes and reboots. By design, no less. Neo is just a
     memory leak that's too hard to fix, so they left him in... The
     users don't complain because they're packed in slush and kept
     sedated"

         --  Marin D. Condic
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