From: Stephen White <spwhite@...>
Date: 2001-07-20T09:18:53+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:18154] Ruby Golf

I've been enjoying the games of Golf in here, but there's something I'd
like to suggest...

Could we play games of golf for the fastest execution, minimum resources,
or some other solution oriented goal rather than "shortest program"?

When a program is optimised for speed, there is still room for writing
"beautiful" code. The most heavily optimised programs lose some of that
readability, but for specific real reasons that are valuable to know.

When programs are written to be as short as possible, good code gets
thrown away in favour of syntaxic quirks. It's quicker to do $* than
it is to do ARGV. It's shorter to define a proc than a function. It's
less space to use globals than to pass parameters.

In the Perl world, "short is good", perhaps because of all of the
games of Golf that have been played over there. Could we aim for
"speed/beauty/power is good" in our games of Golf here? :)

-- 
  spwhite@chariot.net.au