Array Functions and the Rule of Least Power – Pursuit of Laziness

Computer Science in the 1960s to 80s spent a lot of effort making languages which were as powerful as possible. Nowadays we have to appreciate the reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least powerful. Expressing constraints, relationships and processing instructions in less powerful languages increases the flexibility with which information can be reused: the less powerful the language, the more you can do with the data stored in that language. I chose HTML not to be a programming language because I wanted different programs to do different things with it: present it differently, extract tables of contents, index it, and so on. Though the Rule of Least Power targeted programming languages themselves, rather than language features, I think the same ideas still apply.