"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Monday, February 21, 2005

Shortness

Jim Weirich writes about web apps, Ta Da, and Ruby on Rails...

Ta-Da lists uses XMLHttpRequest to interact dynamically with the host. Beautiful.

And to top it off, it is a Ruby-on-Rails application. Written in 579 lines of Ruby code, that’s less than the size of the XML config files used in many J2EE applications.

And John Wiseman writes about Groovy, Common Lisp, and the shortness of code for an RSS reader...
I had forgotten about when I said that the only way someone would be able to compete with the Groovy app was to integrate with Java or Cocoa, or use CLIM: He created a webapp and generated HTML.
It took me about 3 hours to write. The initial quick hack version took only about an hour and was about 120 lines, but it was not as nice as this one :).
The final version of the code, at about 200 lines, looks pretty good and wouldn't be hard to turn into a desktop GUI app.
The shortness is due to Ruby, Lisp, (or Python or Smalltalk or...) being able to hide any kind of functionality behind a few simple lines of code. We should expect these languages to provide roughly the same amount of abbreviation vs. more elaborate notations.

Maybe if you like writing code these languages aren't for you after all. 8^)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe if you like writing code these languages aren't for you after all.I love to write code. Programming is my trade. I work hard to keep my skills sharp and my toolbox up-to-date.

I use the best tool for the job at hand.

Strangely enough, for the past 5 years the best tool for most of my contracts has been Python.

I know you're making a joke. But I think you'll find that the more productive coders are open to good tools that let them do good work. Python is one of those tools.

And my apologies to those who'd prefer I use "software designer" or "developer" instead of "programmer" or "coder". I do all those things and I take out the trash, there's no need to be pedantic.

Anonymous said...

I do all those things and I take out the trash . . . Doesn't Python handle memory management for you?

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.