- Author
- Dave Gauer (ratfactor)
- Published
- 28 July 2026
- Kind
- Personal essay in note form, on a notes site
- Original
- ratfactor.com/cards/pl-small
- Subject
- Systems and hardware
What it is
Dave Gauer writes notes on why tiny programs and small languages appeal. The page is a card in the author's personal collection of notes. It mixes examples, quotations and opinion.
What it says
- The author says small programs are approachable and more likely to get read.
- A reader's 46-byte Forth is shown as a hexdump. The author says tiny code feels less scary.
- Code golf is called meaningful: a Lisp with garbage collection can fit in 436 bytes.
- Forth, Lisp and Tcl have tiny cores and great power. They demand a shift in thinking.
- The author names Lua as small yet approachable, with a core described in 27 pages.
- The author quotes David Ungar that simplicity beats expressiveness.
- The author ties the love of tiny code to a wider love of miniatures.
What evidence it gives
The page lists examples such as a 25-line library and a 122-line interpreter. It shows a 46-byte hexdump and a short Lisp evaluator. It quotes Ungar, Garfield and Langin-Hooper. It gives no measurements.
Interests and limits
The page is one person's opinion and taste. Comparisons of language size, such as Lua against Zig, are not measured. The page does give a short counterpoint on expressiveness. Quotations from other writers were not checked.