Principle of Least Power

13 Oct 2009

Tim Berners-Lee on choosing a computer language

Nowadays we have to appreciate the reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least powerful. The reason for this is that the less powerful the language, the more you can do with the data stored in that language. If you write it in a simple declarative from, anyone can write a program to analyze it in many ways.

It’s the programmer’s version of choosing the simplest file format for storing data.