

I can’t believe I’m praising Tcl - curtis
http://www.yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html?

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billswift
>>Lots of people have noticed that keeping your code short is extremely
important. More surprisingly, many people fail to notice this, probably
because "1 line is better than 5" doesn’t sound that convincing. OK, think
about 100K lines vs 500K and you’ll get the idea. Oh, there are also those
dirty Perl/shell one-liners that make one doubt about this. I’ve known a
Bastard Programmer that used 2K bash one-liners as his weapon of choice. OK
then, so the actual rule must be "short code is good unless it’s written by a
bastard". But it’s the same core idea.

The key is _readability_ not shortness for its own sake. Generally, shorter
helps, but not if it is made too concise for easy understanding.

As for "ad hoc scripting languages" you should read Fred Brooks comments on
"The Worst Computer Language Ever", IBM's Job Control Language (JCL) in his
new book _The Design of Design_.

------
curtis
This is a repost of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=170510> from about 3
years ago. I missed it the first time.

