Attila Lendvai wrote on Wed, May 13, 2020 at 02:35:52PM +0200: > > > Transitioning to Perl was hard, but after about a year I grew to have some > > > respect for it. > > > > I have come to respect Perl more, from a Common Lisp perspective. > > > > Both Common Lisp and Perl are about code compression. Common Lisp > > enables you to compress the complex things into tiny pieces of code. > > Perl enables you to compress the common things into tiny pieces of > > code. > > i would argue against calling a high level of freedom to formally > express abstractions as... 'code compression'. the latter is certainly > a sideffect of the former, but the goal is not code compression per > se.
Absolutely. My way of thinking here comes from Common Lisp's property of "keep each assumption during coding into a single place and leave it in a single place". So that when the assumption changes later you only have one place to edit. And (more importantly) you know precisely how many places you have to edit (n_places != 1 would be fine if it was known for sure, but it isn't know in languages without compile-time computing). When I program like that the critical parts of the program tend to be concentrated in small amounts of source code, so I used the terminology of "compressing code for the complicated cases" for Lisp. Martin -- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Martin Cracauer <craca...@cons.org> http://www.cons.org/cracauer/
