Java is somewhat legendary for being rather overly wordy. But, if a new language starts off its list of 'why should you use this' with comparing how to write to the console (java: `System.out.println`, other languages: a simple `puts` or `printf`) always strikes me as silly and turns me off of the language.
Who cares? When I'm writing toy command line apps, complexity is never going to be the problem, certainly not in the 'what do I print to the terminal' part of the code. And if I'm writing actual software where complexity is actually an issue, the odds that this code has any business writing directly to standard out in the first place are infinitesemal. Your language is optimized to do stuff I'm never going to care about. How silly.
However, perhaps it's not _just_ about the short sightedness of inexperienced devs who get tricked into thinking a language is all that because of optimisations to the 'write some toy stuff' process flow.
Think about it, how would you write a tutorial or 'sales pitch' for a dev environment/programming language _without_ focussing on how easy it is to write Hello World and other toy projects?
How would you highlight how the namespacing system seems like overkill for an app whose entire codebase is half a page of text in a large font, but is actually really good at making an easily navigable codebase once we hit the 5 personyears level? I really have no idea how you would show it. You could talk about it and pray that the reader is familiar enough with the challenges of codebases that have grown beyond 'one person tinkering around for a weekend', but almost by definition I don't think you can bash that down into a tutorial or pitch you can consume in 5 hours, let alone 10 minutes.
Still, languages could do more. I think most languages are just kinda bad at natively supporting the idea of DAG-based modular isolation: As code bases grow larger you want to be able to strictly enforce the ability to take a much smaller chunk of that base, draw a circle around it, and say: This can be understood on its own, it is dependent only on these things, and only these parts are 'public API', 'public' here meaning: accessible to other circled-off parts of the entire code base.
Maybe because it demos bad. And that's a real shame. It's many orders of magnitude more important than 'You can just write `puts` to echo to terminal, and there is no need to declare a method for the main entrypoint!'
If I made a tool that was good for large codebases, I'd demo it by making a video ostensibly demonstrating someone unfamiliar with a large codebase reading a simple JIRA ticket for the first time and then using the IDE/language/toolset to explore the codebase and figure out what actually needs to be done, the whole time narrating and pointing out each feature of the language, tool, IDE, etc that makes this experience quicker, easier, better.
It could even be a relatively fake example and I think it would still land if your audience has had experience exploring large codebases
> It could even be a relatively fake example and I think it would still land if your audience has had experience exploring large codebases
The problem is this can get pervaded quickly.
In most extreme cases, the 'example' is literally only useful for hello-world style things, and anything more complex requires digging deep into docs to understand (I can think of at least one .NET library where this 'blogger-friendly' API structure exists...) And then as alluded to, every example shows this simple case that doesn't help anyone know how to configure things in ways that are testable/etc.
Who cares? When I'm writing toy command line apps, complexity is never going to be the problem, certainly not in the 'what do I print to the terminal' part of the code. And if I'm writing actual software where complexity is actually an issue, the odds that this code has any business writing directly to standard out in the first place are infinitesemal. Your language is optimized to do stuff I'm never going to care about. How silly.
However, perhaps it's not _just_ about the short sightedness of inexperienced devs who get tricked into thinking a language is all that because of optimisations to the 'write some toy stuff' process flow.
Think about it, how would you write a tutorial or 'sales pitch' for a dev environment/programming language _without_ focussing on how easy it is to write Hello World and other toy projects?
How would you highlight how the namespacing system seems like overkill for an app whose entire codebase is half a page of text in a large font, but is actually really good at making an easily navigable codebase once we hit the 5 personyears level? I really have no idea how you would show it. You could talk about it and pray that the reader is familiar enough with the challenges of codebases that have grown beyond 'one person tinkering around for a weekend', but almost by definition I don't think you can bash that down into a tutorial or pitch you can consume in 5 hours, let alone 10 minutes.
Still, languages could do more. I think most languages are just kinda bad at natively supporting the idea of DAG-based modular isolation: As code bases grow larger you want to be able to strictly enforce the ability to take a much smaller chunk of that base, draw a circle around it, and say: This can be understood on its own, it is dependent only on these things, and only these parts are 'public API', 'public' here meaning: accessible to other circled-off parts of the entire code base.
Maybe because it demos bad. And that's a real shame. It's many orders of magnitude more important than 'You can just write `puts` to echo to terminal, and there is no need to declare a method for the main entrypoint!'