From: Conrad Schneiker <schneik@...>
Date: 2000-07-13T14:11:45-05:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:03975] Principle of least effort -- another Ruby virtue.

Hi,

While the principle of least surprise is an important virtue, by itself,
it doesn't convey the notion of productivity.

An abstract for a talk by Dr. Damian Conway (the OO Perl book author,
famous for showing that Perl OOP isn't a completely hopeless affair
after all) mentioned the "principle of least effort". (Sort of reminds
me of the principle of least action from physics, although this has a
somewhat different meaning than least effort. I think Von Neumann once
mentioned that every law of physics could be equivalently expressed in
terms of the principle of least action.)

Well, I think Ruby offers far greater scope for the application of the
principle of least effort than most other languages, and this principle
seems to have been implicit in the design of Ruby. So I think we can
usefully summarize many comments about the virtues of Ruby syntax,
elegance, uniformity, OOP features, and so on as "Ruby embodies the
principle of least effort".  It is Ruby's realization of the principle
of least effort which helps makes solving hard problems easier.

In this context, the principle of least surprise may be viewed as an
important subsidiary corollary of the principle of least effort.

(Keep in mind that the principle of least effort is meant to apply to
programs and programming overall, on the average, not to every possible
case or code fragment.)

--
Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)