Not Again

Not Again

Posted May 25, 2012 15:46 UTC (Fri) by dashesy (subscriber, #74652)
In reply to: Not Again by dvdeug
Parent article: PHP: a fractal of bad design (fuzzy notepad)

you may be the best ML or Modula-3 hacker in the world, but if someone else has to work with you or will have to maintain it after you, those probably aren't the best languages to use.

Very very true, but same can be said about most other languages as well. C++ is more popular but some boost-like paradigms should be avoided in a not so technical company that does not get many job applicants with high level of skills (not Google so to speak).

If it is in a library that no body is going to see the source then it might be OK. I had to remove so many Functors+for_each statements recently and replace them with simple for loops, because over time they had evolved into ugly monsters passing and changing state. A simple rule of thumb (for work-place I described) is to try to avoid what a language does not provide naturally (not highlighted by IDE is a good sign); no lambdas for C++ even for skilled programmers, please just switch to C++11 if you need them.

A competent programmer who does not work in an elite workplace (Google, RedHat, ...), should think ahead, if working on the next Google, then even inventing a new functional language might be worthwhile let alone using Haskell, otherwise please keep it as simple as possible.

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