It's possible in any language and yet some languages' codebases are consistently worse than others ;)
If you create a culture of cleverness, implicitness and metaprogramming, that's what the programmers using your language will do. It's self-selection to an extent.
"I've suffered long from the Ruby ecosystem's mentality of 'look at what I can do!' of self-serving pointless DSL's and frameworks and solemnly swore to myself to stay away from cute languages that encourage bored devs to get 'creative'." [1]
"I worked at a Scala shop about 10 years ago. Everyone had their own preferred "dialect", kind of like C++, resulting in too much whining and complaining during code reviews. IMHO, the language is too complex." [2]
> And all the while, every one of these lines could be mutating some shared state
That's where the obvious code helps.
Let's circle back.
> I still don't know what people mean by "obvious" code.
The Zen of Python is a nice primer: [3]. A beautiful display of taste right there.
A few concrete examples:
- "Explicit is better than implicit."
Explicitly returning errors means we get to see every single point at which something could error out - explicit, as opposed to exceptions that could implicitly propagate from any line of code, with no way to tell.
Preferring pure functions - a pure function is a black box with a clearly drawn boundary line of input->output. Trivial to reason about in isolation.
No automatic type conversions.
No global state - any part of the code could change it.
No metaprogramming - you've learned Ruby but now some parts of the language have been changed to mean something completely different!
"The syntax has so many ways of doing things that it can be bewildering. As with Macro-based languages, you are always a little uncertain about what your code is really doing underneath." [4]
- "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it."
Uniform code. Iterating through an array always looks the same, so if the code you're looking at does it differently, you'll pay attention.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13482459
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31219392
