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PLAYING_GOLF

                                             September 8, 2020

Programmers-- particularly, perl programmers-- talk about
"playing golf", meaning trying to get something done with
the fewest "strokes" possible (usually meaning the
shortest code in terms of numbers of characters).

This game is actually sometimes played explicitly as a
game, programmers might enter a tournament where the goal
is minimizing characters, and the general understanding is
that there's most likely no practical purpose served by
this.

The trouble is that it's easy to fall into a state-of-mind
where you *presume* that shorter code is probably better
because it *can* be (e.g. fewer lines to execute would
typically mean faster execution), though often the
performance speed-up (if any) is negligable and not worth
neglecting other concerns-- readability, maintainability--
that might be served by more straight-forward code, even
if it's longer.









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