From: Dave Thomas <Dave@...>
Date: 2000-07-13T14:38:53-05:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:03977] Re: Principle of least effort -- another Ruby virtue.

Conrad Schneiker <schneik@austin.ibm.com> writes:

> I think Von Neumann once
> mentioned that every law of physics could be equivalently expressed in
> terms of the principle of least action.)

Is that the same as Hamiltonians? 

> 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.

I couldn't agree more. Andy and I call this virtue 'transparency'. By
that we mean that Ruby doesn't obscure the problem solution by
imposing itself, either in terms of extraneous syntax or by making the 
programming write all sorts of scaffolding code to support the
application logic. Ruby gets out of your way.

However, maybe we can look at a list of Ruby's principles of least:

Principle of Least Surprise
Principle of Least Effort
...?


Dave