Before everyone rushes out to defend golfing (too late), consider this...

When I golf, and I am guessing this is pretty typical, I basically slap some line noise together, and see what happens when it runs. I might edit and execute my program hundreds of times, but this is no biggee...I have a syntax highligting editor that catches typos, a shell with command line history, a windowing OS, browser open to hyperlinked man pages, and my own box with cycles to burn. If I get too clever and screw something up, I spend 99% of my time debugging, and almost none wrestling with the environment.

Now consider the programming environment of 1972. Punch cards, line editors, batched jobs on shared mainframes, byzantine manuals on dead trees...editting, compiling, executing code, and reading docs was a pain in the ass. It could literally take hours to learn your program had a fatal one character typo.

Given all this, I think I would stay aware from "clever" progamming languages, too. At least for a little while...:)

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.