Even less so now that docstrings can be mostly written by AI
Are people, their critics, really bothered with the writing aspect of verbose code?
Verbose code - and their example shows it quite well - is less concise. To me, their example and reasoning looks more overly verbose, over-engineered rather than well or thoroughly designed and safe.
What makes more sense depends on the context. Where is and will it be used? What is it being exposed to?
A simple data holding class for one “internal” layer to the next can have a very simple form, so it’s easily understood. It may not be safe against misuse or mistakes, but the simplicity and clear use-case and intention much outweighs those costly safeguards to me. For maintainability, for readability, for clarity.
It’s always a balancing act between simplicity and easy understanding vs safeguards and costs. If there’s less risk you can make it much simpler - which reduces other, less obvious risks and costs.
The example made me immediately spot how C# quite a while ago introduced language constructs for what would otherwise be a lot of boilerplate programming like they do in their example.
public record Reservation(DateTimeOffset Date, string Email, string Name, int Quantity, bool IsAccepted);
no need for 78 lines of code with 9 methods.
C# also has the with keyword for copy-adjusting immutable types.
And required init syntax provides another alternative for an effectively immutable type.
public class Reservation
{
public required DateTimeOffset Date { get; init; }
public required string Email { get; init; }
public required string Name { get; init; }
public required int Quantity { get; init; }
public required bool IsAccepted { get; init; }
}
From the article:
(…) but recently, another type of criticism seems to be on the rise.
The code that I suggest is too verbose. It involves too much typing.
This reads like a one-sentence strawman. Describing code as “too verbose” is really not about the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome. It’s about readability and cognitive load.
The blogger seems to almost get the point when he writes the following:
In short, the purpose of source code is to communicate the workings of a piece of software to the next programmer who comes along. This could easily include your future self.
The purpose of source code is to communicate (…) to the next programmer who comes along.
If you make the mistake of going the “enterprise quality java code” meme approach, you’re making the next programmer’s life needlessly harder.
The blogger then tries to make his case with verbose code, and makes the following statement:
Which alternative is better? The short version is eight lines of code, including the curly brackets. The longer version is 78 lines of code. That’s ten times as much.
I prefer the longer version. While it takes longer to type, it comes with several benefits. (…)
This is yet another strawman. The longer version is awful code, not because it’s longer but because it’s needlessly jam-packed of boilerplate code. Ignorign basic things like interfaces and contracts, It’s been proven already that bugs in code are directly proportional to the number of lines of code, and thus the code the author prefers is likely to pack ten times more bugs.
The shorter code in this case would not be the 78-loc mess that the author picked as the thing he prefers. The shorter code in this case would be something like onboarding the project onto Project Lombok to handle all-args constructors, property methods, and even throw a builder in for free. This requires onboarding Lombok to the project, and add two annotations to the short example. Two lines of code, done.
After the blogger fails to make his case, he doubles down on the typing non-sequitur:
Perhaps you’re now convinced that typing speed may not be the bottleneck (…)
This is a blog post that fails to justify a click. It’s in the territory of “not even wrong”.
it’s not a bottleneck to writing good code anyway
I discovered this very quickly after breaking a finger. One-finger typing didn’t slow me down at all. Turns out my brain was the bottleneck.
