In the discussion about issues raised by Revenge of the Nerds on the LL1 mailing list, Paul Prescod wrote something that stuck in my mind.
Python’s goal is regularity and readability, not succinctness
On the face of it, this seems a rather damning thing to claim about a programming language. As far as I can tell, succinctness = power. If so, then substituting, we get
Python’s goal is regularity and readability, not power.
and this doesn’t seem a tradeoff (if it is a tradeoff) that you’d want to make. It’s not far from saying that Python’s goal is not to be effective as a programming language.
| Author | Paul Graham |
| Work | Succinctness is Power |