All too often, people try to explain things by beating about the bush, never really coming to their point. Or they do, but by the time they get there, you've lost all interest, and never actually finish reading it. So, to encourage conciseness (and before I prove my own point), I'm going to give a quick example of removing "fluff".

Here is the results of generating something concise enough not to put anyone to sleep. Note that this is from a well-known Perl talk, which should be obvious to everyone. I'm not going to replicate the whole thing, that is an excersise for the reader. If you figure it out, feel free to respond, but use <spoiler>...</spoiler> tags so as not to ruin the fun. So, without further adieu, here are the results:

  1. no
  2. no
  3. of course
  4. yes
  5. nopers
  6. well, duh, yes
  7. no
  8. no
  9. no
  10. no
  11. yes
  12. yeppers
  13. no
  14. no
  15. yes
  16. no
The astute will notice that this is still far too verbose. We could simplify even further: NNYYNYNNNNYYNNYN. Since we are talking about computers, let's just use zeros and one, and we get 0011010000110010. Well, that's still far too much detail - since this looks like binary, we can compress this down into, say, hex: 3432.

That's great, but I think we can do better. Since this is an even number of hex digits, we can convert these to bytes. That becomes, um, er...

42.

That's strange.

(Sorry.)

In reply to Information Density (or, how not to write a tutorial) (OT) by Tanktalus

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