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0 pointsjohnisgood1y ago0 comments

I do not think it is any meaningful. If you have such a library in C, or Common Lisp, or Forth, then using that library is probably always going to be just a few lines of code. The library just has to have a good enough API.

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radanskoric1y ago· 2 in thread

It depends on the flexibility of the API. If you're making an API for just one specific use case, you can make it a one liner in any language, even assembler: just push the exact specific functionality into the one function.

Language expressiveness is more about making the interface support more use case while still being as concise. And Ruby is really good at this, better than most languages.

johnisgoodOP1y ago

I don't disagree, I do find Ruby readable, and it was the first language that caught my eye back when I was a kid, precisely because of its readability and expressiveness.

I suppose we have to define expressiveness (conciseness, abstraction power, readability, flexibility?), because Ruby, for example, has human-readable expressiveness, Common Lisp has programmable expressiveness, and Forth has low-level expressiveness, so they all have some form of expressiveness.

I think Ruby, Crystal, Rebol 3, and even Nim and Lua have a similar form or type of expressiveness.

radanskoric1y ago

Yes, exactly, Ruby has the human readability expressiveness.

If you say that expressivity is the ability to implement a program in less lines of code then Ruby is more expressive than most but less than for example Clojure. Well written Clojure can be incredibly expressive. However, you can argue that for most people it's going to be less readable than a comparable Ruby program.

It's hard to talk about these qualities as there's a fair amount of subjectivity involved.

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