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Succinctness is Power

paulgraham.com · 3,039 words · saved by 1 readers

May 2002 "The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid." - Charles Babbage, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture In the discussion about issues raised by Revenge of the Nerds on the LL1 mailing list, Paul Prescod wrote something that stuck in my mind. Python's goal is regularity and readability, not succinctness. On the face of it, this seems a rather damning thing to claim about a programming language. As far as I can tell, succinctness = power. If so, then substituting, we get Python's goal is regularity and readability, not power. and this doesn't seem a tradeoff (if it is a tradeoff) that you'd want to make. It's not far from saying that Python's goal is not to be effective as a programming language. Does succinctness = power? This seems to me an important question, maybe the most important question for anyone interested in language design

Succinctness is Power --> May 2002 "The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid." - Charles Babbage, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture In the discussion about issues raised by Revenge of the Nerds on the LL1 mailing list, Paul Prescod wrote something that stuck in my mind. Python's goal is regularity and readability, not succinctness. On the face of it, this seems a rather damning thing to claim about a programming language. As far as I can tell, succinctness

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