Comment on Left to Right Programming
Deestan@lemmy.world 4 days agoThat is one of the points, yes.
But, the reason for wanting the IDE to validate based on partially entered expressions is given as making it easier to follow the code for a person working left-to-right.
And it’s not an invalid thing to want, but I expect the discussion to also include how it affects reading the code for a non-beginner.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It’s got nothing to do with being a beginner. I’ve been working as a professional software developer for ~15 years now and still I have to use new libraries/frameworks/in-house dependencies quite frequently. I know how to get the length of a string, and so does the author of the article.
But that’s why it’s a simple example and nothing more, and it applies to everything else. We write left to right, and IDEs autocomplete left to right, so it makes sense for languages to be designed to work that way.
There’s a lot of reasons why Java works much better with IDEs than python, and this is one of them.
Besides that, it is best practice to show problems on simple, easy to follow use cases that highlight exactly the problem in question without further fluff. It’s expected that a non-beginner can abstract that problem into more difficult use cases, so I don’t think OOP did anything wrong with choosing string length as an example.