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

Peter Hickman peter.hickman at semantico.com
Fri Apr 13 16:04:14 BST 2007


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

Honesty should be a given and Integrity has absolutely nothing to do 
with anything!

> 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.

The term here is brevity, no one mentioned word count. Brevity requires 
focus and careful selection of the words you use. Brevity is also in 
relation to the subject involved. An article describing how traffic 
lights should be used can exhibit brevity in a few words but an article 
explaining Quantum Chromodynamics can be exhibit brevity and be very 
very long. The subject matter provides a context for the quality.

Perl golf is a straw man argument. Your original post rambled over 
several subjects without exhibiting any connection between them.

>
> 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.

Just because people write long articles that you find insightful does 
not mean that long articles are of themselves insightful.

-- 
Peter Hickman.

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