To balance out the Perl I thought I’d share this quote. [PyURL]
“I thought that it was a firm principle of language design—out of concern for programming as a human activity—that in all respects equivalent programs should have few possibilities for different representation […]. Otherwise completely different styles of programming arise unnecessarily, thereby hampering maintainability, readability and what have you. This requires from the language designers the courage to make up their minds!”
- Edsger W. Dijkstra on GREEN, an early version of Ada
My personal goal when writing Python libraries is that the code one writes without looking at the documentation should work. Sadly, it seems few people understand the concept of ease-of-use when applied to libraries. Ken MacLeod is one of the few excellent library designers.
posted September 02, 2002 10:33 PM (Technology) #