Flutterby™! : Code Overhead

Dave Winer took some cheap shots at overhead in C# versus Frontier, but it got me thinking about how much boilerplate crap I've come to see as acceptable. When I was first exposed to Cobol I said "150 lines, minimum?", but now the C system under which I spend most of my time is a multi-threaded monstrosity which pushes huge responsibilities back on to the programmers. Even Perl has the obligatory:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict;

at the head of every program. The purpose of a good programming language is to not bog down the programmer with cognitive load, to let the algorithm be expressed succinctly and clearly. It's very easy to lose track of just how succinct and clear the algorithm can be at its core. Thanks for the reminder, Dave.