Re: The Rule of Least Power

Original Message From: "Noah Mendelsohn"

> Furthermore, immediately under that guidance, the Finding goes on to say:
>
> "In aiming for simplicity, one must of course go far enough but not too 
> far. The language you choose must be powerful enough to successfully solve 
> your problem, and indeed, complexity and lack of clarity can easily result 
> from clumsy efforts to patch around use of a language that is too limited. 
> Furthermore, the suggestion to use less powerful languages must in 
> practice be weighed against other factors. Perhaps the more powerful 
> language is a standard and the less powerful language not, or perhaps the 
> use of simple idioms in a powerful language makes it practical to use the 
> powerful languages without unduly obscuring the information conveyed (see 
> 3 Scalable language families). Overall, the Web benefits when less 
> powerful languages can be successfully applied. "
>
> Maybe I'm too close to this one,  but that seems pretty balanced and 
> appropriate to me.

The clarifying text does seem to change it from a rule to a guideline!

I'm thinking that static data can be represented using XML, or (arguably) 
less powerful JSON, or even less powerful .ini file format or even CSV.  But 
to me it seems a world using all four of those representations is actually 
more complicated than just using XML.

Maybe a "Rule of  Not Over Complicating" would be better!

Pete Cordell
Codalogic Ltd
Twitter: http://twitter.com/petecordell
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