OT: Crazy Programming

[Chris]

In article <87offlnq3k.fsf at mathdogs.com>,
 Mike Coleman <mkc+dated+1023822045.28c649 at mathdogs.com> wrote:

> Oleg Broytmann <phd at phd.pp.ru> writes:
> >    BTW, the idea of Perl Golf is interesting, but unapplied to Python. It
> > is possible to write short ugly programs in Python, but I would not to make
> > them the goal of a contest.
> >    I'd better see a contest for "Python elegance", but unfortunately
> > "elegance" is hard (though not impossible) to measure.
> 
> That was my thought exactly.  It's kind of a cool idea, but measuring the
> wrong thing.  The shortest programs may have hack value, but they're
> absolutely awful in terms of readability, maintainability, etc.  This may be
> orthogonal or even somewhat in line with the Perl ethos

Perhaps at times it is the result, but the driving force in the Perl 
community, from my experience, is that there is more than one way to do 
it.

Give a group of Perl programmers a problem and you'll probably get more 
different answers than there are people giving them.  In the end, the 
best idioms become commonplace, but they become commonplace not just 
because they're obvious, though that might be the case, but because the 
alternatives have been explored and the accepted approach has genuine 
benefits.

While I enjoy Python - and I do... it opned up the world of OO 
programming for me - I think there's almost a danger in things being too 
obvious.  Creativity can be a messy business, but ultimately it leads to 
better places.