

An Interview with Brian Kernighan: Breeding Little Languages - mapleoin
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/04/an-interview-with-brian-kernig.html

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ggchappell
> Should examples--even beginner examples--include the error-handling code?

> Brian: I'm torn on this. Error-handling code tends to be bulky and very
> uninteresting and uninstructive, so it often gets in the way of learning and
> understanding the basic language constructs. At the same time, it's
> important to remind programmers that errors do happen and that their code
> has to be able to cope with errors.

The lesson we learn from this is that we should design languages so that
error-handling code does not have to be "bulky".

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ced
Do you know any language where it's not bulky?

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ggchappell
> Do you know any language where it's not bulky?

Good question. Off the top of my head, I'd say, "no".

OTOH, one can look at _relative_ bulkiness. E.g., I've found that dealing with
exceptions in Python is significantly less work than in C++.

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greggraham
I gave up on awk when Perl became available, and after that, Python. However,
after reading this interview, I think I should relearn it.

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sketerpot
It's very handy when you're working with delimiter-separated data. I've never
bothered to learn the more powerful features of awk, because Python is
generally better for sufficiently complicated text processing, but for little
one-off scripts, awk is a nice thing to know.

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silentbicycle
Right. Awk is great for the sweet spot of 1-3 line filters, and the subset of
the language needed for most of those could fit on half a page. You could do
bigger stuff with it, but at that point it's probably better done in another
language. There are surprisingly many cases where a few lines of awk is good
enough, though.

Perl is logically a superset of awk, but there's so much more in the core
language that I kept forgetting parts of it.

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pmarin
bwk is a great writer. I enjoyed reading "Practice of Programming" and "The
AWK Programming Language".

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mark_h
I completely agree (and the list doesn't stop there of course; it's pretty
sobering when you look at just how many great books he has co-authored). Every
single one of them is a great example of crystal-clear and concise writing.

