Python to Perl Conversions

[Robin Becker]

In article <37bc2ee5 at cs.colorado.edu>, Tom Christiansen
<tchrist at mox.perl.com> writes
...
It's a good thing I'm in the killfile as otherwise my response would be
raising the blood pressure of this arrogant person. Perl with any amount
of documentation sucks when compared to python. It's not so much the bad
language structure/syntax but the lack of sensible advice. Also (it's a
number thing) there are good reasons for maths/engineering types like
myself to prefer python. 
>
>Don't be silly.  That wasn't that at all.  Online searchable documentation
>is critical in a technical subject like this.  Imagine libc without
>manpages!  Or having no manpages for the shell tools. Now, you might
>now be aware of this, but I happened to *write* most of that on-line
>documenation for Perl.  I'm super senstitive to not being able to look
>up docs using standard CLI text-based tools.  As you said, you would be
>frustrated not to have docs for tools or libraries.
>
>Something the python community might should learn here from the perl
>community is our zealous position on usable documentation.  HTML alone
>sucks, as does putting things only on the web (two different issues).
>That I can't even get "man python" to come up pisses me off more than
>you can imagine.  I strongly feel that you really should consider making
>something easy for CLI people to use just like any other tool or library.
>That's why we have "pod" as base docs, which can convert into HTML,
>text, info, latex, frame, troff (manpages), etc.  It makes it easy to
>run grep or find programs on.  This is very important.  And each module
>automatically installs that module's manpage (and optionally html doc,
>but this is less popular amongst perl folks).  That gets it added to
>the apropos and whatis and man commands automatically.  This is about
>0.002% of what the MakeMaker thingie in Perl does, but it's the part
>that matters for docs.  I've surely heard Python folks drooling over it
>for a long time.  Also, the CPAN autoinstaller than runs it all for you.
>All very spiffy.
>
>--tom

-- 
Robin Becker