About the Cruft

storytotell.org

4 pointsparenthesis6 comments

I would have liked to have seen the code for the 4 languages. Maybe that's just me.

Me too.

Also I am getting tired of all these "my language can do this in 4 lines vs 5 lines in your languae so your language sucks"-posts. Line-counting is a pretty dumb and insightless way of comparing language power and tells far from the whole story.

There's a tiny kernel of truth to the line-counting argument - if you find yourself repeatedly typing the same patterns of code over and over again, and there's no way to refactor it so that the pattern's expressed only once, then yes, then you're probably using a language with weak abstraction capabilities.

But yeah, trying to arrange all languages along a single "axis of power" is a pretty pointless exercise...

Yes but you are talking about abstraction power which is ofc important.

But 4 lines vs 5 lines doesn't really say that, if it did then we would all be using Perl.

Heh, Perl is no match for J! ;)

http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Studio/IdiosyncraticIntroduct...

When talking about Prolog what did he mean by "Then I thought about what it would take to do line input/output, got the shivers..."?

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