[Off topic] Software epigrams

[Dan Sommers]

On Tue, 14 May 2013 04:12:53 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 4:02 AM, Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> wrote:

>>> 8. A programming language is low level when its programs require
>>> attention to the irrelevant.

>> I think "irrelevant" in this context means stuff like memory
>> management.

> Sure. That one's pretty clear (if you care about memory management,
> you want a low level language) ...

http://www.memorymanagement.org/articles/lang.html says:

    C programmers think memory management is too important to be
    left to the computer. Lisp programmers think memory management
    is too important to be left to the user.

    (from Ellis and Stroustrup's The Annotated C++ Reference Manual)

> ... It's just that the difference between relevant and irrelevant is
> hard to define.

And if I've designed my program the right way, what's relevant in one
place (package, module, function, line of code) is different from what's
relevant in another.

Dan