Robert A. Uhl

Size: code’s worst enemy

Steve Yegge blogs about size being code’s worst enemy. He mentions how more advanced languages offer mechanisms to compress code size and announces what he believes the Next Big Language will be: JavaScript running atop the Java Virtual Machine.

I’ve just recently been learning some JavaScript; it’s a cool language with some neat features. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it ‘Lisp in sheep’s clothing’ as some have done, but it is definitely nicer than a lot of languages. I’ve not used it enough to tell if it’s more powerful than Python or not, but I am led to believe by others that it is.

I sure don’t like going back to braces-and-semicolons code again; Pythons whitespace and Lisp’s parentheses are much nicer IMHO.


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