Is verbosity thing of past!!

Verbosity in simple english means, more words than required.

If we translate it in software terms, it means how many words you need to do a task in a said programming language. While some coding styles are more verbose than other, some programming languages itself are more verbose than other.

Verbosity can be as simple as self explanatory verbs or nouns for function or variable names. Or explicit lines of code explaining each operation.

The good, the bad and the ugly

• Good: when it comes to debugging, understanding the code in detail or analysing reports, verbosity might come handy.
• Bad: Too many and cluttered information can deviate from the actual information.
• Ugly: Bulky application and high response time. In general utilising more memory and CPU than the process needs

Java’s love for verbosity

Being a java developer I had started programming by developing a love for verbosity. Apart form being a syntactically verbose language for years, it also advocated verbosity for debugging purpose, like printing stack-traces or thread dumps.

Printing a simple “Hello World” in java is

class HelloWorldApp {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello World!");
    }
}

What it actually means is :

print "Hello World!"

essentially everything above and below are noise.

Verbose language improves readability and during the early coding days, the software terminologies were not part of a regular developer vocabulary, it helped read and understand the code better. With the advancement of software, coding is no longer a professional skills, children learn coding in primary schools. With basic terms like functions, classes, variables etc being part of regular vocabulary, readability no longer means verbosity.

We can easily increment a number using

x++

and we wont need a

setX(){
x= get(x)+1;
}

Verbosity in CLI

Most CLI enabled languages are terse in nature and offer quick response to commands. However it has an explicit flag for verbosity, for debugging purpose.

If you are a command prompt champion and understand responses to command, well and good. However you always have an option for a verbose feedback detailing every course of action

Being Terse

While being terse optimises the code size, and saves extra processing time for interpretation, extremely terse languages can be indeed a challenge to use.

Languages like Perl or bash, use a combination of key words or symbols used in different orders to perform different operations. Its quick and convenient for the few who are well-versed with the terms, however its highly error prone for others. Also in case of an error, debugging the same becomes a challenge.

Linguistic programming

With reduction in documentation related to code, use of nouns, verbs and sentences helps in understanding code. However with increasing acceptance of symbols and key words, the linguistic programming is slowly moving towards mathematical programming. Using a + instead of add, or x for multiple requires no explanation.

Farther the written code is from the processed code, longer is the processing time.

Linguistic is not always readable, mathematical representation of popular expressions are often more readable than theoretical. (x+y) is any day more readable than (adding y to x).

Middle ground

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”

is a compressed version of lines from a 1933 lecture by Einstein

The reason why verbosity exists at the very first place is maintainability. Hence a stable programming language is a middle ground, where the processor understands few key verbs and nouns and the developer understanding few symbols and expressions.

Highly verbose languages like COBOL is easily readable by non-programmers. However programming language is a vocabulary any person writing or maintaining code is expected to learn.

On the other hand completely terse languages are restricted to be operated by few experts, hence in a large and frequently changing ecosystem become handicapped due to it. When you are still learning, the nouns, the verbs and sentences save you from being scared and amused of the concept. However once you are handy with the concept, terse gets more readable for you and rest sound like commentary.

Happy coding!!