Polynomial Division Challenge

J J azreal1977 at hotmail.com
Sun Jul 22 15:59:48 UTC 2007


> From: mmille10 at comcast.net> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org> Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 21:25:57 +0000> Subject: Re: Polynomial Division Challenge> > Hmm! I see what you're saying. You make a really good argument against Code Golf. After I read your note I thought to myself, "Well it was based on Perl Golf for crying out loud." I felt kind of dumb not seeing that as a red flag. I paid a little attention to the metrics that were used, like "keystrokes",If they are using keystrokes as the criteria then they don't count it right.  All those perl programs should have at least 50% more then the literal characters in the source file since you have to hold down shift (or worse on non-English keyboards) for at least half of what is in the program.>but I didn't fully consider their implications. You're right. It just encourages ugly code. When I looked at the stats of the "top 10" winners in the Polynomial Division problem, I noticed that the Ruby and Perl versions> were winning out over the Python versions. I've read that Pythoners tend to be more concerned with a "correct way to do things", which puts them at a disadvantage using this sort of criteria. You're right that things> like the length of method names can also put a program at an advantage or disadvantage in the rankings.Well, actually one must keep in mind Perl has made "concise" synonymous  with "unreadable" but it doesn't have to be so.  Haskell, for example, is in fact quite a bit more concise then Perl (except in the most trivial of cases), but very readable even if you don't know the language.
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