Speaking My Mind

This is something of a counterintuitive idea: Comments should be meaningless What, I hear you ask, are you talking about? Comments should communicate to the reader! At least that is the received conventional wisdom handed does over the last few centuries (decades at least). Well, certainly, if you are programming in Assembler, or C, then yes, comments should convey meaning because the programming language cannot So, conversely, as a comment on the programming language itself, anytime the programmer feels the imperative to write a meaningful comment it is because the language is not able to convey the intent of the programmer. I have already noticed that I write far fewer comments in my Java programs than in my C programs.  That is because Java is able to capture more of my meaning and comments would be superfluous. So, if a language were able to capture all of my intentions, I would never need to write a comment. Hence the title of this blog.

This one has been cooking for a very long time. Like many professional programmers I have often wondered what is it about programming that is just hard . Too hard in fact. My intuition has led me in the direction of turing completeness: as soon as a language becomes Turing complete it also gathers to itself a level of complexity and difficulty that results in crossed eyes. Still, it has been difficult to pin point exactly what is going on. A Simple Loop Imagine that your task is to add up a list of numbers. Simple enough. If you are a hard boiled programmer, then you will write a loop that looks a bit like: int total = 0; for(Integer ix:table) total += ix; Simple, but full of pitfalls. For one thing we have a lot of extra detail in this code that represents additional commitment: We have had to fix on the type of the number being totaled. We have had to know about Java's boxed v.s. unboxed types. We have had to sequentialize the process of adding up the numbers. While one loo...