[zovirl]

And at the extremes, too much power makes a tool less useful. I don’t drive an F1 car to work, I don’t plant tulips with an excavator, I don’t use a sledgehammer when hanging a picture. Those tools are all too powerful for the job.

[tsegratis]

planting flowers? trowel

planting foundations? excavator

once you specify "the job", the best tool is "the solution" to that job only. anything else is excess complexity

however if "the job" is unspecified, power is inverse to the length of "the solution"

so is constraint of power bad?

--

a fascinating question

just like music can be created by both additive and subtractive synthesis; every line of code creates both a feature and a constraint on the final program

in which case power can be thought of as the ability to constrain...

[tsegratis]

that is quite wild...

it implies expressivity is the ability to constrain

it implies drawing on a page, or more broadly, every choice we make, is in equal parts a creative and destructive act

so maybe life, or human flourishing is choosing the restrictions that increase freedom of choice? it's so meta it's almost oxymoronic; concretely: we imprison people to maximize freedom; or, we punish children with the aim of setting them free from punishment

this is the same as the walk from law into grace found in Christian ethics

maybe the ultimate programming language then, provides the maximal step down that path, and this is also the most useful definition of "power"

i.e. place on people those restrictions that increase their ability to choose