RE: 99 bottles

["Anton van Straaten" <address@hidden>]

> > Who needs all those extra "features" and "syntax"???  Well, I
> > suppose Larry, Guido, and Matz have to keep themselves busy
> > somehow...!!
>
> In 1982 (a mere twenty years ago) Alan Perlis wrote:
>
> "Beware the Turing Tar-Pit, where everything is possible but nothing of
> interest is easy."
>
> I suspect that we may not need the extra features for our languages to
> be Turing-Complete, but we need the extra features to be Perlis-Easy.

I agree, mostly.  I did think it was amusing, though, that for this
particular problem, an LC solution was comparably concise to scripting
languages, without even requiring much library support.  If one avoids
deliberate crypticness and adds a bit of extra sugar (like a "let" clause),
it's actually very readable, too.

BTW, although I'm familiar with the Perlis quote, I don't know the context.
If he was thinking of Turing machines at all, that's where LC has an
enormous advantage.  Functional abstraction will get you a long way without
really needing "extra features", and that's why I said that I only "mostly"
agree.

And a separate question is whether "extra features" actually makes things
"of interest" easy, or simply makes it appear as though they might be.

Anton