[ale] What to use

[hbbs at attbi.com]

I'm fascinated by this stuff.  

My days of coding regularly are way past, but I developed an interest in Python
and Perl and chose to look more into Python.  I think it's mostly a result of my
being "old-school" (e.g., FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, ATLAS).

It also occurs to me that at this point in time, any programming I do is likely
to be pretty tame stuff complexity-wise and as such Python's "warts" probably
aren't going to bite me as badly as they might people who are trying to solve
arbitrary problems.

- Jeff
> >>>>> "John" == John Wells <jb at sourceillustrated.com> writes:
>     Fletch said:
>     >> At any rate, before this devolves into a dissertation on why
>     >> Python blows :)
> 
>     John> Actually, that'd be interesting to read...  
> 
> *sigh*, OK I'll bite.
> 
> 
> A quick top few of the warts:
> 
> * the whitespace thing (which pretty much means no `python -e ...',
>   which means you have no quick recourse to it from the command line)
> 
> * despite its vaunted OO-ness, it's got gaps (e.g. len(array) instead
>   of array.len; come on even Javascript gets this right :)
>  
> * despite its vaunted regularity, trailing commas are sometimes
>   syntactically significant with different effects in different
>   contexts (e.g. tuple creation for assignment, newline or not for
>   print)
> 
> * lambdas aren't (aren't really closures, that is)
> 
> * the whole lack of real namespaces (although this has gotten better)
> 
> * no CPAN (and no, the Parnassus thing doesn't come close to CPAN)
> 
> 
> To be fair, some good things:
> 

> * Classes and methods are first-class data types
> 
> * the `"%(foo)s %(bar)" % dict' interpolation construct
> 
> * the way parameters are handled (the current perl mechanism is a
>   crufty holdover from perl4 days; there are some alternatives with
>   conventions and modules, but they're kind of kludges)
> 
> * the xmlrpclib module is really handy for one off clients (I've
>   actually got about 5-8 cookie cutter descendents of one program that
>   all interface to a perl XML-RPC server, because it takes about 2
>   minutes to replace the guts of one to present data from a different
>   call)
> 
> 
> Again, I didn't want to digress into a long language advocacy rant.  I
> would definately recommend learning Python, but it's just got enough
> warts that I personally don't have the urge to use it regularly.  Also
> as I mentioned look into Ruby, which has stolen from both Python and
> Perl (I'm actually trying to find an excuse to write something
> somewhat substantial in Ruby, I just haven't had a chance yet).
> 
> 
> -- 

> Fletch                | "If you find my answers frightening,       __`'/|
> fletch at phydeaux.org   |  Vincent, you should cease askin'          \ o.O'
> 770 294-0820 (m)      |  scary questions." -- Jules                =(___)=
>                       |                                               U
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale

_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale