A Succinctness Challenge

From: Alexander Burger (abu_at_software-lab.de)
Date: 05/29/04 

Date: 29 May 2004 14:10:46 GMT

There are endless discussions about the best and most powerful
progrmming environment. The subject is mostly a matter of taste, and can
usually not be measured in absolute terms. But perhaps is it possible in
some certain, well-defined fields?

According to Paul Graham, the power of a programming language is equal
to its succinctness (see "http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html"). I
agree with him, and extend his postulate from languages to application
development environments in general.

I'm spending most of my time writing the database-and-GUI kind of
business applications. So this is the field where I'm personally
interested in, and which is sufficiently large and specialized in its
requirements to be also of general interest. I'm using Pico Lisp for
that, having built an application server framework on top of it with
quite high succinctness and abstractions for this type of applications.

I don't doubt that other people have tried to solve these problems before, so
there should be other environments with equal or higher succinctness (and thus
programming power). To make the systems somehow comparable, I specified a very
simple application with certain typical features, and posted it as a challenge
to the Lisp community:

   http://software-lab.de/succinctness.html

There is a specification, a complete solution (in Pico Lisp), and a link
to a life test setup.

- Alex 

-- 
   Software Lab. Alexander Burger
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   abu@software-lab.de, http://www.software-lab.de, +49 821 9907090