Nothing to do with Scheme (was: Re: [plt-scheme] No More Boring Code)

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 02:07:03PM -0700, John Clements wrote:
> On Apr 10, 2009, at 1:11 PM, Michael Coffin wrote:
> 
> >I used to be a huge fan of fancy abstraction tools. I still like  
> >them a lot when I program for fun. However, after working for a few  
> >years on a huge code base (Google's) written by thousands of  
> >programmers of varying skill, I'm not so convinced anymore. A couple  
> >things to remember:
> >	• Code is read a lot more often than it's written, and while  
> >boilerplate is a pain in the ass to write, it's easy to read  
> >precisely because it's trivial.
> 
> This is a little like saying that I'm reading much faster now that I  
> put 30 copies of the word "the" at the beginning of each sentence.   
> That is, the addition of the trivial code doesn't change the  
> complexity of the non-trivial code; indeed, it serves to obscure it.  
> It's hard to extract and focus on the important bits from the  
> background noise of the boilerplate.

The big problem with boilerplate is when you make it *almost* the same.
You glance at it, figure it is the same, and never see that it's
quite different.

-- hendrik