Friday, March 10, 2006

The Rule of Least Power

Via Phil Wadler's blog, I see that Tim Berners-Lee has written a "W3C Finding" on a principle he terms the rule of least power. The idea is that you should use the least powerful language possible to solve any given problem, in order to achieve the greatest ability to reason about the program statically.

I've talked about this principle before as the balance of expressive power with reasoning power.

In working on the ECMAScript design, I've already seen this issue come up several times, for example with the problems caused by dynamic scoping.

No comments: