From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2005-12-13T06:04:06+09:00
Subject: Re: [QUIZ][SOLUTION] Kalah (#58)

On Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 03:57:10AM +0900, James Edward Gray II wrote:
> 
> I will tell you that I notice I'm getting pickier and pickier about  
> code length though.  I'm certainly not looking to encourage golf  
> (that's pretty much the opposite of what Ruby Quiz stands for) and  
> I'm not trying to slack off on summary work, but I truly believe  
> correct Ruby involves "Writing less code."

If you have to rewrite something three times to get it down to two lines
instead of five (as typically happens in golf), you're not "writing less
code" anyway.  Rewriting it once to idiomize the code in a Rubylike
style to make it more readable and maintainable can reduce the amount of
code needed to maintain it later, so it's sorta like an investment, so
if rewriting it once to get five lines down to three in a Rubylike style
is probably worth being called "writing less code", but golf, I would
say is not: it's gratuitous.

That's not to say I think golf is bad.  Gratuitous stuff like that can
be highly entertaining.  It's just not the same as "writing less code".

In other words, I definitely tend to like the way you handle it.

Apparently, being a little sick has given me diarrhea of the mouth.
Forgive my rambling.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]

unix virus: If you're using a unixlike OS, please forward
this to 20 others and erase your system partition.