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Free Verse Programming (is maybe not so great)
Created: 2024-10-16
Stuart Halloway gave a talk in 2013 titled "Ousterhout’s Dichotomy Isn’t (Part 2 of the Simplicity/Power/Focus Series)"
In speaking about power in terms of expressiveness, he quotes poet Robert Frost:
"Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down."
Which is perhaps to say that maximum expressiveness lets you do whatever you want, but it doesn’t supply a lot of guidance. I relate this to the benefit of limitations in learning (with a programming example) and art.
Halloway also quotes this W3C finding:
In a later part of the talk titled "Measuring Abstraction Powers", Halloway lists three powers of expression a language might provide:
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Concision
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Locality
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Simplicity