4 ms·
What I took away from Graham is that there is a verbose way to do something and a concise way. I suppose writing a book to describe general relativity is a verb
by apples_oranges 7y ago
What I took away from Graham is that there is a verbose way to do something and a concise way. I suppose writing a book to describe general relativity is a verbose way to express what the equations say.
Perhaps power = ability to be more concise which translates into "more things done per unit of time compared to a less powerful language."
- goto11 7y agoBut terseness is just one desirable property. Sure, all else being equal we would like to express the same with fewer tokens. But there are other factors in play, e.g. a statically typed language like Haskell will typically be more verbose due to type annotations, but you catch bugs earlier, thereby saving time. So different kinds of power is at play, and you will have to make a trade-off decision.
- apples_oranges 7y agoYes indeed.
- agentultra 7y agoIt’s less verbose than many statically typed languages due to inference. As long as you stay away from high level type extensions like RankNTypes, you can write whole programs without a single type annotation and still get full type checking.