I found this in a 1972 essay and thought you folks would be interested.
The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly
limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the
programming task in full humility, and among other things he
avoids clever tricks like the plague. In the case of a
well-known conversational programming language I have been
told from various sides that as soon as a programming
community is equipped with a terminal for it, a specific
phenomenon occurs that even has a well-established name: it is
caled "the one-liners." It takes one of two different forms:
one programmer places a one-line program on the desk of
another and either he proudly tells what it does and adds the
question, "Can you code this in less symbols?"---as if this
were of any conceptual relevance!---or he just says, "Guess
what it does!" From this observation we must conclude that
this language as a tool is an open invitation for clever
tricks; and while exactly this may be the explanation for some
of its appeal, viz., to those who like to show how clever they
are, I am sorry, but I must regard this as one of the most
damning things that can be said about a programming language.
--
Mark Dominus
Perl Paraphernalia
In reply to On Golf
by Dominus
Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
Please read these before you post! —
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
- a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
| |
For: |
|
Use: |
| & | | & |
| < | | < |
| > | | > |
| [ | | [ |
| ] | | ] |
Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.
|
|
