

Scala vs. Go: The perspective of a developer with experience with both - avernet
http://www.quora.com/Go-programming-language/Scala-vs-Go-Could-people-help-compare-contrast-these-on-relative-merits-demerits/answer/Nick-Snyder-1

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inflagranti
I see this explicitly argument being made more and more recently. A language
is better because it’s more explicit and hence easier for people to
understand. I think it’s completely wrong. If you want to be _really_
explicit, use assembler. But everyone would argue that this is _too_ explicit
and _harder_ to understand. So definitely explicitly in itself in a language
is not intrinsically better.

What I think this whole argument is about is levels of abstraction. By saying
language A is more explicit then B and hence easier to understand, what he
really means is that language A is on exactly that level of abstraction that
makes most sense to him. It might even mean that it makes most sense to most
developers and he does mention the bell curve, but I think that discussion is
still out.

Personally I would argue that Scala, Rust, D and at the very extreme Scala are
_not_ too high level, it’s just that most developers nowadays learned
programming in something like C, Java (pre 8) or C++ (pre 11) and hence are
used to that level of abstraction that feels natural to them. I’m confident
though that a next generation, learning early on more functional constructs
that are more and more pervasive in newer languages and also newer version of
“old” languages (Java, C++) will feel natural to them and the “right” level of
abstraction.

