Ask HN: To what extent does succinctness = power in a programming language?

1 points by acalderaro 9 years ago | 2 comments

I was reading PG's essay succinctness is power, and he left an open question. Is succinctness the same thing as power? What is the end-goal of abstraction if not to be more succinct?

PaulHoule 9 years ago |

"I got sick and tired of programming in blub and then I realized blub only had 23 keywords so I abbreviated them to a single lowercase letter and have people write identifiers starting with either an uppercase letter or one of the three remaining lowercase letters. Ever since I started programming in 'b' I started wearing out keyboards so often -- those blub programmers will never understand the value of 'b' being a succint language since they have never used one.

blackflame7000 9 years ago |

I would say succinctness = productivity but not necessarily power. It could be argued that succinct code is easier to digest and less prone to bugs, but on the flipside brevity in the description of what the code is doing is the bane of all maintainers existence. There is certainly a threshold where succinctness starts to be detrimental in the ability to express and convey logic to next person who looks at your code.