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David Manura wrote:
On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 10:29 AM, David Kastrup wrote:David Manura writes:The "Huffman encoding" language design principle in Perl says that common operations should have shorter syntax than less common operations.So if Perl did not look like line noise, it would be a sign that this design principle was not yet fully heeded.I think the emphasis here is more on a relative rather than just absolute length and it doesn't mandate using non-alphanumeric tokens or maximizing absolute density at the expense of readability [snip]
An impossible social issue to settle, I rather think, since the range of skills is very wide. Like many Perl users, I can only type away on a keyboard in a subset of Perl, so that's one unintended way of allowing beginner and expert use to coexist. Can one say I am using precisely the same Perl? Maybe not, since I am practising TIMTOWTDI without any skills to code in "other ways". This would also not work with a small fat-free language.
Derek Jones, in his "The New C Standard" (a downloadable PDF draft) went to impressive lengths in discussing cognitive effort in the use of C code and syntax. A lot of very useful data, but in the end, it seemed to me that issues like longer or shorter syntax cannot even be resolved through any amount of data (and I think that is basically Jones' position too). Experienced coders are of course more comfortable with a higher level of complexity.
So it ends up in the art of design, and as such we end up with some subjective opinions. You can't please everyone -- do your best and still some will waggle "toy language!" at you... As for those who loudly take extreme positions, well I think it's just acoustic resonance due to favourable structural and material properties. :-)
-- Cheers, Kein-Hong Man (esq.) Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia