Sebastian Smith wrote:
On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 09:25:45PM -0700, Colin Corr wrote:
I favor Python as my scripting language of choice, though I admit that
it takes 12 lines of py code to do the same as 3 lines of pl code... but
at least 6 months down the road, I can still figure out what my (or
someone else's) py script is doing upon review.... without a reference
guide, or contextual details.
http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html
I find it hilarious that Paul Graham has a PhD in Computer Science from
Harvard, and, furthermore, that he is an author. His essay is horrible!
If this is what the scientific method has become, than it's no wonder the
US is falling in world scientific rankings! How a computer scientist
could make such arguements astounds me, let alone a PhD.
He gets 6 million website hits per year. I wish I could revoke those I
just contributed.
He's not just a PhD comp.sci. guy.. he also founded viaweb, one of the
early leaders in web based application development.
I'm not certain exactly what turned you off to this particular essay,
but I don't think it was intended to make a scientifically valid point,
or really a language comparison point. I thought it was designed to
more or less pose a question. While designing a computer language, is
it possible that having a language be *too* expressive or too succinct
is a bad thing?
He tried to kind of 'normalize' the discussion by saying he was
interested not in the absolute syntax of the language, but the number of
expressive elements. In the case of perl's write-once or write-only
syntax, while there are extremely terse ways of expressing your programs
in perl, they may not actually reduce the number of elements in your code.
For example, in perl you can do:
if ($foo == $bar) {
do stuff;
}
or
do stuff if $foo == $bar;
You can call #2 'equally succinct' to #1, because it expresses the same
logical elements, just with fewer characters.
Dunno, Graham's writings have partially motivated me to take on much
higher level tasks which ended up paying off quite handily in the past.
He's a big proponent of using the most powerful tools available, even if
they're not the most popular tools available in industry. I found quite
a bit of usefulness in that attitude.
- Sebastian
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