Re^2: Autoboxing ... "Yes We Can" ( or how I learned to love TIMTOWTDI ;)

[LanX]

> To me, it is completely incomprehensible, why there are such strong opinions put forward.

Balancing principles like "reads like a human language" and "orthogonal features¹" is not easy.

Especially if they are confronted with...

• "avoids too much nesting"
• "backward compatible" (Perl4)
• "maintainable implementation"
• "portable implementation"
• "multi-paradigm"
• "glue language"
• "combines features of older languages"
• "Huffman coding"
• ...²
• "CLI/one-liner friendly "
• "fast"
• "extendable"
• "suitable for project guidelines"
• "DWIM"
• "DRY"
• "self documenting"

... it stops being straight forward science and becomes empirical.

Seeing the big picture is complicated and long discussions become annoying.

After some time many end just reacting on trigger signals, like

"METHODS! They want to transform Perl to Java!!!".

> P.P.S.: Like this (ugly)

Indeed, not the best example! :)

But I agree a well designed autoboxing (i.e. w/o the need of a $-sigil) would help a lot here.

¹) small set of basic rules which can be easily learned and consistently recombined.

²) "remembering all principles" (from here on some items were added)