[fpc-devel] Re: [fpc-l] type discussion

[Vinzent Hoefler]

On Thursday 02 June 2005 14:01, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> Vinzent Hoefler wrote:
>
> > What matters is designing und understanding the code, not writing
> > it. I spend less than 10% of my time at work in actually _writing_
> > code, so even if someone can type in his/her code twice as fast,
> > the maximum (s)he would gain would be five percent in overall
> > performance.
>
> you are missing the point!

No, I don't. I'm damn sure what I am talking about.

> Whather you can implement something faster in another language is not
> the issue.

Right. The issue is if you can make it work, i.e. how long you have to 
test and debug it and how long someone needs to understand it when he 
comes to that code later (that's called maintenance, I think).

> I am arguing for less verbose syntax without decreasing
> the clarity of the code in delphi/pascal

Which is an almost impossible task. Sure you can tweak it here and 
there, but it would _at best_ simplify the task of writing the code in 
the first place. You are just missing the remaining 98% of the 
development cycle of a typical medium to large software project.

You won't gain anything there, even if and /only if/ you could manage to 
simplify some syntax without having *any* impact on understanding the 
code later.

(BTW, Ada is even more verbose than Pascal and for the things I'm doing 
it is still /more/ productive. I'm talking about error rates and such 
stuff, not how much time spending in front of the monitor typing 
something that *may* work, if you just debug it long enough).

> and that is logically gonna
> improve productivity without taking anything away.

It would, if you could actually manage to accomplish that task. But as I 
tried to point out, those 5% don't matter. You can lose *much* more and 
much easily on a bad design. 90% of software development costs is 
testing. And then it is much better to actually be able to _read_ and 
_understand_ the code instead of writing it.


Vinzent.

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