Hi Stef.

> But, to me, readability cannot come from hiding complexities away - it means
> finding a proper vocabulary to explain them clearly, as they are and, as
> Nicolas said, as they will bite anyway.


Sure. "Leaky abstractions" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_abstraction) can be challenging. I just disagreed with the way you "sugarcoated" the effect of comments. Yes, you would have to explain the essential complexity for a hardly readable piece of code with a natural-language comment. Yet, it should be still considered a code smell, given that one did not yet managed to express the solution in idiomatic Smalltalk. :-) And maybe the programming language will never be able to express that essential complexity nicely because it may just not be a good fit for the problem at hand.

Best,
Marcel
Am 22.02.2021 17:42:03 schrieb Stéphane Rollandin <lecteur at zogotounga.net>:
> We should be very careful with every low-level detail we burden the
> high-level programmer with. I find the phrase "[...] problems that users
> will have to learn sooner or later [...]" very problematic in the sense
> that it seems to "just give up" on readable, high-level abstractions
> altogether. Of course, one should not be too naive about this.

Maybe we do not have the same idea about what "readable" means, because
I do agree with you that the code must be readable in all cases. But, to
me, readability cannot come from hiding complexities away - it means
finding a proper vocabulary to explain them clearly, as they are and, as
Nicolas said, as they will bite anyway.

Stef

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