Off topic, but interesting,
Sure... that's why its in 'cafe, right?
Someone else keeps quoting this at me... I prefer Knuth - paraphrased as I cant remember the quote - The best software projects are the ones where the source code has been lost about half way through the development and started from scratch.
The point is programmers start by exploring a problem space without understanding it. Poor programmers just accept the first solution they put down. Good programmers re-implement. Great programmers have a sixth sense of when things are about to get ugly, and start again (and the better you are the less you actually have to implement before you realise things can be refactored for the better)...
Graham Klyne wrote:
What's my point in all this? I supposed it might be summed up as: "The best is the enemy of the good".
Hmmm... I take your point, and I think my attempted pithy summary missed its intended target. What I was trying to convey was a sense that a great language has to let merely average (or worse) programmers do a halfway decent job. There aren't enough great programmers to go round.
And even great programmers sometimes have to work with someone else's codebase (which even if written by a great programmer may have had diffent goals in mind).
(FWIW, I think Python is a language that scores pretty highly on this count.)
#g
------------ Graham Klyne For email: http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact
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