Michael Homer

Jul 17 07:55
I do think there's something to be said about the general approach(es) to that task and that answer seems like it's a good synthesis of them, but I don't think it was a good question to get it. But! Good answers are worth having and useful even if the question left something to be desired and if there's an edit to the question that does make for a good question and fits the existing answers, that'd be good to have
Jul 17 07:50
It's a question about principles and a question about terminology and a question about miscellaneous tips and tricks and...
Jul 17 07:49
Some of those multiple things could be good questions on their own
Jul 17 07:48
I mean, no, I don't think it's a well-posed question, it's asking multiple things twisted up together and then explicitly stating an intent to be an unsuitable question
Jul 16 07:00
(Presuming, again, that this is a term somebody might encounter in the first place)
Jul 16 06:59
An answer that says "it has contrary meanings and people should probably use one of these more specific terms instead" is still a useful one
Jul 16 06:58
Bearing in mind that even "code golf" is an unknown term to most people
Jul 16 06:57
So to me the instant question is too broad, like any other too-broad question, but both a narrower terminology question and some design questions are within it that I think would be suitable
Jul 16 06:56
And questions about widespread but subarea-specific terminology are useful to people approaching from outside that subarea
Jul 16 06:54
Basically, though, I just think we should 1) be open to and even encourage these questions that there is peculiar expertise in here, 2) have the same quality standards for them as other questions, 3) treat them from a broad language design discipline perspective that is not CGCC's focus, and 4) disregard that some are going to see them as unserious no matter what
Jul 16 06:51
@lyxal Just like strong typing
Jul 16 06:50
Statistically golfier is one version people might mean, but it seems to an outsider like there are many others
Jul 16 06:48
They definitely didn't mean it to be, but it seems it would fit many but not all definitions of it...
Jul 16 06:47
Is Smalltalk a functional language?
Jul 16 06:43
I don't think those are necessarily intentional design decisions either!
Jul 16 06:41
Like this, I think is a fair question and the answer is complex and perhaps points towards not using those terms at all
Jul 16 06:41
23
Q: How are "strong" and "weak" typing defined?

kaya3According to Wikipedia, the terms "strongly typed" and "weakly typed" do not have agreed-upon formal definitions: there is no precise technical definition of what the terms mean and different authors disagree about the implied meaning of the terms and the relative rankings of the "strength" of t...

Jul 16 06:40
I think "what does it mean to say a language is 'functional'?" is a fine question and also has a lot of cloudy boundaries in answering it
Jul 16 06:38
Where this sort of nuance about how it's used, changes over time, etc are part of what sustains a strong answer
Jul 16 06:38
Presuming that something is a term that is used (and people definitely seemed to understand "golfy"), someone could wonder why APL is and Python isn't, so it's a meaningful term even if it has vague boundaries (just like "functional" does) and that seems like it should be an in-scope terminology question
Jul 16 06:33
The same really applies to "golfy" as a bit of jargon
Jul 16 06:31
I am imagining uses like "we chose to design it X way because it was golfier"
Jul 16 06:29
But if that isn't terminology that's actually in use then it's not a good question, no
Jul 16 06:28
It's like the strong-weak typing question, it's seeking to understand what is signified by some bit of jargon when someone uses it
Jul 16 06:27
It does presume that people say that some thing is golfier than some other/in some fashion, which maybe doesn't happen then?
Jul 16 06:27
"What does it mean to say ..." is a question about the use of terminology, which is empirical linguistics, not objective metric comparison
Jul 16 06:25
So an answer that identified changes of meaning over time would be a good response to that
Jul 16 06:24
@lyxal It was, but that's not "when is a language 'golfier' than another", it's a question about jargon of the field and what it's communicating
Jul 16 06:23
But if we take that as unsuitable, the instant question is very far out of scope
Jul 16 06:22
Well, that wasn't the question I suggested
Jul 16 05:28
I would like us to have questions that make use of the user base we have and there should be good golf-language questions that there is real expertise in here (though I know that some people still aren't going to like them)
Jul 16 05:26
I'm not sure how much better it was before that, it's just very broad. I think the terminology question ("what does it mean to say one language/design is golfier than another") implied by the title is a well-scoped on-topic question. Something about actual design elements should be possible, but I don't have a pitch for it in mind
Jul 16 01:01
There is scope for a lot of questions about designing a code-golf language, but a catalogue of tips about how to make a language "more object-oriented"/"more functional"/"more declarative" would also not be a real question
Jul 16 00:59
The title question is about terminology and probably has useful answers
Jul 16 00:58
It's just not intending to be an actual question
Jul 16 00:58
@lyxal There absolutely is and this question doesn't explore any of it
Jul 15 19:47
I can’t see any way that “intended as a catalogue of tips” can be a real question
Jul 10 08:39
> For example, I personally believe that Visual Basic did more for programming than Object-Oriented Languages did
Jul 5 18:09
And Visual Studio was boxed software you had to buy
Jul 5 18:09
There were still print magazines about computing in 2002
Jul 5 05:46
But nothing new without a similar level of resourcing behind it gets anywhere these days
Jul 5 05:43
I feel like Swift got a lot of ads before it was ready
Jul 5 05:25
There were printed magazine ads for C# when it came out. I guess that doesn't happen any more
Jul 5 05:24
As a discipline programming seems to attract that behaviour
Jul 5 05:23
There is a fanatical userbase for just about every language and we get them starting arguments on the site on the regular
Jun 26 00:53
Yeah, that
Jun 26 00:52
I think I liked the previous one more than the final version. One of them, anyway
Jun 26 00:51
Some of the earlier JEPs for this had more in the way of special cases
Jun 26 00:27
I mean, it's all a collective effort, but I believe he was a part of it at Microsoft and he's the listed JEP owner at Oracle