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Postings from March 2021
On Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 6:42 PM Philip R Brenan <philiprbrenan@gmail.com> wrote: > > Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when > there is nothing left to take away. > > Antoine de Saint-Exupery > <https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/antoine-de-saint-exupery-quotes> > I love this quote, it's one of the one's Stevan recited frequently regarding the design of Moose. On the one hand `trim()` is expanding the number of builtin functions and littering the namespace with extra things to remember. A differing view is that that is that `trim()` removes a common use of `s/^\s+|\s+$//g` and everything that entails the user to understand about Perl's implementation of regular expressions for the simple common case of "removing starting and trailing whitespace". Interpreting this maxim with the idea that syntax is what should be taken away, you end up with the lambda calculus, tinyBF, and OISC computers where they are beautiful in their simplicity, but maximize the amount of information the programmer has to maintain while programming. Interpreting this maxim the other way you end up with ... well the common punchline when I was starting out was "Perl." Antoine de Saint-Exupery isn't famous for writing empty books, he's famous for an expressive use of poetic language that contained enough, but no more. Perl is certainly not a minimalist language, but in my experience it tries (sometimes unsuccessfully) to allow for an expressive use of poetic language that minimizes how much state the developer has to maintain in their head at a time. -ChrisThread Previous | Thread Next