

About the Cruft - parenthesis
http://www.storytotell.org/articles/2008/05/12/about-the-cruft

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

~~~
globalrev
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.

~~~
qwph
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...

~~~
globalrev
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.

~~~
qwph
Heh, Perl is no match for J! ;)

[http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Studio/IdiosyncraticIntroduct...](http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Studio/IdiosyncraticIntroduction)

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giardini
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..."?

