Attila Lendvai wrote on Wed, May 13, 2020 at 02:35:52PM +0200:
Transitioning to Perl was hard, but after about a year I grew to have some respect for it.
I have come to respect Perl more, from a Common Lisp perspective.
Both Common Lisp and Perl are about code compression. Common Lisp enables you to compress the complex things into tiny pieces of code. Perl enables you to compress the common things into tiny pieces of code.
i would argue against calling a high level of freedom to formally express abstractions as... 'code compression'. the latter is certainly a sideffect of the former, but the goal is not code compression per se.
Absolutely.
My way of thinking here comes from Common Lisp's property of "keep each assumption during coding into a single place and leave it in a single place". So that when the assumption changes later you only have one place to edit. And (more importantly) you know precisely how many places you have to edit (n_places != 1 would be fine if it was known for sure, but it isn't know in languages without compile-time computing).
When I program like that the critical parts of the program tend to be concentrated in small amounts of source code, so I used the terminology of "compressing code for the complicated cases" for Lisp.
Martin