On Topic: 1. perl-begin.berlios.de + 2. Meta: Apology for Tactlessness

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Ovid!

On 4/10/07, Ovid <publiustemp-londonpm at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Shlomi Fish <shlomif at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I've subscribed to this mailing list from my gmail.com address, in
> > order to
> > mitigate the fact that shlomif at iglu.org.il has been banned by an
> > administrator.
> >
> > The purpose of this message is two fold:
>
> Side note:  I never read this email.  It was too long.  Brevity is God.
>

I agree that brevity is important, but:

1. There are other measures of quality besides it, and some of them
are more important. Honesty and integrity for example.

If we take Perl as an analogy then Perl golf may give the shortest
solution, but it's not the best one, and often would me much slower
than a slightly longer solution. Not to mention, that people will find
most Perl golf hard to read and maintain.

2. The content of some documents justify that they would be longer
than most or else people may have misconceptions, or one will not be
able to enumerate or reason a lot of his feelings. Most of Paul
Graham's articles have a common theme, but I enjoy reading the
individual paragraphs that are sometimes unrelated because Graham is
very insightful.

Similarly, I found the book "The Origins of Consciousness During the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes to be extremely
insightful despite its length, and the Neo-Tech advantages (
http://www.neo-tech.com/advantages/ ) while long, also have a high
SNR.

As you may know, the more entropy you have, the more space you need to
express it. And some  things have a lot of information inside them.

Regards,

          Shlomi Fish

Knuth is not God! Brevity is, though.

------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/

Electrical Engineering studies. In the Technion. Been there. Done
that. Forgot a lot. Remember too much.