I've been doing systems work for 20 years. Here's why most of those things are actually good:

- Strings are subtly complex, but strings are not variables. You can assign a string, and later handle it as a variable, and not deal with any of the specifics of string-iness. Likewise, you can take a variable, and later treat it as a string (for loosely or not-typed variables).

- Magic switches are not magic, they are options. Virtually every program takes options. Sometimes they impact a lot of things, sometimes a little. Only the context determines how much is "too much".

- Terse/cryptic variables allow you to write complex expressions in a compact form. This allows you to read more in a small space, making it easier to reason about or form complex expressions. Human languages are flush with these, as is mathematics. But you have to balance the terse, cryptic and magical with guilelessness, or it becomes a mess.

- Terse and magical syntax is, again, a feature, not a bug. Using magical syntax I can do in a few characters what would take me many lines with a traditional language, and as we all know, increased number of lines correlates to bugs, in addition to simply making it harder to grok.

- Types aren't ignored, but they may be very loosely enforced. If you want to write a quick program to get something done, typing is a curse. If you want to write a very thorough program, typing is a blessing. In many cases, loosely or untyped programs actually work better than their typed cousins, because they allow for more unexpected behaviors without failing. Failing early and often may be a modern trend, but... it literally means things fail more, and this is often not desirable.

Caveats:

- Programs that are hard to read do indeed suck, and it takes lots of experience to make some kinds of programs easier to read. But that's not an indictment of the program, it's an indictment of the person who wrote it. We don't indict English when somebody writes a document that's impossible to comprehend.

- Interestingly, some of the more popular languages are the worst to debug. Perl is probably one of the easiest languages to debug, not inconsequently because of how good the interpreter is at suggesting to the user what the actual problem was and almost exactly how to fix it.

user:	throwaway38941
created:	September 29, 2021
karma:	7