Hi

[Martin Cracauer]

Attila Lendvai wrote on Wed, May 13, 2020 at 02:35:52PM +0200: 
> > > Transitioning to Perl was hard, but after about a year I grew to have some
> > > respect for it.
> >
> > I have come to respect Perl more, from a Common Lisp perspective.
> >
> > Both Common Lisp and Perl are about code compression.  Common Lisp
> > enables you to compress the complex things into tiny pieces of code.
> > Perl enables you to compress the common things into tiny pieces of
> > code.
> 
> i would argue against calling a high level of freedom to formally
> express abstractions as... 'code compression'. the latter is certainly
> a sideffect of the former, but the goal is not code compression per
> se.

Absolutely.

My way of thinking here comes from Common Lisp's property of "keep
each assumption during coding into a single place and leave it in a
single place".  So that when the assumption changes later you only
have one place to edit.  And (more importantly) you know precisely how
many places you have to edit (n_places != 1 would be fine if it was
known for sure, but it isn't know in languages without compile-time
computing).

When I program like that the critical parts of the program tend to be
concentrated in small amounts of source code, so I used the
terminology of "compressing code for the complicated cases" for Lisp.

Martin
-- 
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Martin Cracauer <cracauer at cons.org>   http://www.cons.org/cracauer/