The standard Perl wisdom is that There's More Than One Way To Do It#

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 02:04:21 +0000

The standard Perl wisdom is that There's More Than One Way To Do It.

In Lisp there are often also many ways to do the same thing. At a low level you'll often see people on comp.lang.lisp or wherever comparing approaches: debating loop vs do, or the finer points of format strings, or closures vs objects, or recursive vs iterative solutions (for the record, tail-recursion is not the Holy Grail; if the problem is natureally recursively decomposed, use recursion. Otherwise just write a loop, already. And these debates just tend to help everyone involved to acquire a more complete picture of the language.

At a higher level, of course, there are many different strategies for solving the problem, but where in Perl you might go with that other well-known saying "the Right Answer is whatever lets you get your job done" (aside: I'm sure I remember hearing this all the time; now I can't find a single instance of it on Google. Maybe I'm assigning too more pragmatism to the Perl Way than I ought; sorry, guys), in CL you typically (at least, I typically) spend a bit more thinking time upfront to decide on an elegant solution.

I appear to be suffering choice paralysis.