On 2014/05/05 20:00, Richard Hipp wrote:
I am deeply committed to the concept that simpler is better. And I am deeply skeptical of arguments that making a language more complex by adding new type rules does anything to reduce bugs.
To add to this, I have heard a lot of proponents on both sides of the fence, but the idea that introducing more complication will make erros/bugs less is just false. Sure - every rule will prevent a certain error type or bug kind, but it will introduce another thing that can be done wrong. And if you introduce a 100 rules, you will have a 100 things all with their own special exceptions and things that can be done wrong. This in itself does not mean one should only go for the simpler way in computing terms, but it does mean in human terms that it is easier to learn and remember the 20 peculiarities of the 5 simplest basic ways of doing, than the 200 more (but maybe less weird) complications of the added/introduced new 100 rules.
The problem, if I may guess, that caused the post is not so much dismay at how it works in SQLite, but more of a "I wasted n hours figuring out that the way it works in x and y, which I am used to, and it simply does not work the same in z, and I'm very dismayed that I did not know z doesn't work like that and it caused me headaches and time to realize." - This not being an invalid complaint, but rather one that is immediately unimportant once the basis is understood - hence not seeing this same complaint crop up a lot previously (or ever, actually).
I have never found a computer language of any sort in which I did not, at some point, had a bug due to a typo that took me ages to find. The problem is that bad logic niggles at your mind, and you know it might be needing fixing... but a typo is assumed in your mind to be the thing you intended to type, which should be very correct and above scrutiny of your brain's internal debugger. It's the worst kind.
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