minimalism

[arnold@cc.gatech.edu (Arnold Robbins)]

> From: byron@netapp.com (Byron Rakitzis)
> Message-Id: <9210280117.AA25914@netapp.netapp.com>
> 
>         It's too slow and too big.
> 
> I think that's just a Bell Labs pissing contest. Over there your macho-
> ness as a programmer is measured in inverse proportion to the number
> of lines of code you produce for a given task.

Yes, Minimalism is an absolute there.  Unfortunately, sometimes minimalism
makes it hard to get Real Work (tm) done.  Compare Perl to Awk sometime.
Perl is a Gosh-awful mess to read, but people with real work to do love it.

I think there are things that could be added to awk to make it more useful
in the ways Perl is, but you have to be careful.

"What's his point?" you're all muttering... Minimalism is good as a goal, but
you shouldn't let it get in the way; if you really need a feature, add it.
A good example is the -u flag on sort. It was added because so many people
were just calling uniq anyway, and it made things go more efficiently.

Just another point of view from the awk guy over in the corner.

Arnold Robbins --- College of Computing			| Ping is the screw-
Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332-0280			| driver of network
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