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Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine wrote a mouse-driven spreadsheet in a single line of BBC BASIC. Tokenised, it was less than 254 characters. No load or save capability, but full formulas and cell references, and demand-driven recalculation.

I should find, reformat, annotate, and re-implement it. If only I had the time. One day.

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I wanted to write a short computer program but didn't have te time?

The length of the program isn't necessarily correlated with the amount of time it takes to write it, or more importantly, understand it ;)

I believe that's the joke:

"I wanted to write a short computer program but didn't have the time (so I wrote a long program instead)".

It is not a joke. Optimization takes time.

As the foremost domain expert on the subject (the subject being what I meant by my own comment), I can say with 100% certainty that it was in fact a joke, or rather a poor attempt to paraphrase Mark Twain's: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

Of course you are right, optimization does take time, whether you are optimizing a computer program or a letter.

Not Twain, Pascal: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/.

But yes—just as applicable to computer programming as letter writing.

It is a joke.

Things that are shorter or smaller generally take less time to produce than things that are longer or larger, it's a joke because the opposite is true in this case. Jokes can be true statements as well as falsehoods.

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