Sugar considered harmful

for the health of your programming language

• Not just talking about syntactic sugar

• Sugar makes it easier to swallow a bitter pill.

• Sugar is anything that makes an immediate-term difficulty more palatable at the expense of long term codebase health.

• Sugar can give you a boost of energy when you need to get over a hill but it’s not actually a suitable ingredient for building or repairing your body.

• Once you start eating sugar, the meal is over.

• https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2012-02/msg03159.html

• http://timhatch.com/ark/2006/01/31/syntactic-sugar-considered-harmful

• https://jelv.is/blog/Structure-your-Errors/

  try to keep data structured as long as possible and push operations that lose information towards the edges of your system. Information is fundamentally easier to destroy than to (re)create!

  This is not about sugar but has the same underlying dynamics. Sugar is fundamentally easier to apply than to remove!

• “Purity is composable, pragmatism is not”

• Sugar prevents users from having to understand the details but it also makes it harder for them to understand the details at all.