(One of) Perl's mottos is, There's More Than One Way To Do It.

An often fruitful brainstorming technique is to look at some attribute, assert the opposite, and then stress it to an extreme.

As a thought experiment in language design, consider a highly structured language in which There Are Few Ways To Do It, or even There Is Exactly One Way To Do It, TIEOWTTI.

I have some ideas, but I would like to hear others before contaminating yours. This is not a troll or a homework. I'm thinking about what are the benefits and costs of languages with complicated syntaxes versus other sorts of languages.

Assume there exist perfect tools which compile to perfect do-what-I-mean code, regardless of syntax.

- Mitch


In reply to TIEOWTTI by mnp

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.