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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)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ8u_sWT9Ls

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:

https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower-2006-01-23.html

In a later part of the talk titled "Measuring Abstraction Powers", Halloway lists three powers of expression a language might provide: