
500 Lines or Less - yadongwen
http://aosabook.org/en/index.html
======
codepie
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11796253](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11796253)

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adamnemecek
I'm liking this trend. Basic ideas of full blown pieces of software often take
surprisingly few LOC to implement. Anyone willing to guess how long the first
release of git was?.
[https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23...](https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23ca2e25604af290)

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0xmohit
A URL shortener made literate (43 lines) [0]

[0] [http://bitemyapp.com/posts/2014-11-22-literate-url-
shortener...](http://bitemyapp.com/posts/2014-11-22-literate-url-
shortener.html)

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jplasmeier
Shouldn't it be "500 Lines or Fewer"?

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bhrgunatha
I like the Wikipedia article [1] especially the historical use section:

"Less has always been used in English with counting nouns."

Over the years I've changed from prescriptivist to descriptivist. Surprisingly
because once I started to teach English my eyes opened to the vast discrepancy
between formal grammar and actual use. Eventually I began to realise that
language is what people use, not what people tell you to use. I still correct
people when they are learning English but I'm only strict where it interferes
with meaning. Using less instead of fewer certainly does NOT confuse the
meaning.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less)

Edit: jake-low beat me to it - I'll leave the link though

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flashman
I'm generally sympathetic to descriptivism, but I encourage people to stick to
prescriptivist rules in situations where departing from them would lead to
reputational damage. (Then again, it's probably worse to be branded a
pedant...)

Of course this situation is manifestly unfair to ESL speakers, or anyone whose
lack of familiarity with formal English leads to misconceptions about their
intelligence.

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greglindahl
It's related to Postel's Law: you can be as prescriptivist as you like for
your personal writing, just don't ding other people for being descriptivist,
or a second-language speaker.

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adrianratnapala
I am very much in favour of common politeness. Also there is the plain fact
that there is no rule saying every utterance must have correct grammar and
usage.

But style guides that fail to describe the rules that have emerged over the
centuries, and which actively avoid giving guidance on edge cases, do not help
anyone. Especially not foreigners wishing to learn English.

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greglindahl
The crawler looked so pretty that I'm hacking away on a real crawler based on
coroutines:
[https://github.com/cocrawler/cocrawler](https://github.com/cocrawler/cocrawler)

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sidcool
Such a short life and so much awesome to learn. Very promising book.

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0xmohit
The source for the book is available at
[https://github.com/aosabook/500lines](https://github.com/aosabook/500lines)

~~~
cponeill
Awesome. Can't wait to dig through this.

