Alien whitespace eating nanovirus strikes again!

[Paul Prescod]

Martijn Faassen wrote:
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> I don't intend to start a flamewar or anything, and I'm sure Larry Wall
> is a nice guy, and Perl is nice and all, and the postmodern
> rationalisation of the confusion that Perl is to me is *fun* (but does
> not work for me), but Larry Wall seems to be infected by the whitespace
> eating nanovirus meme. 

The first time he mentioned this I thought he was joking. He attached a
"Hi Guido!" to indicate that he was. Now it seems he is serious. He thinks
that whitespace usage somehow goes to the heart of the way Python
programmers think about their craft -- as if in Python, whitespace is as
central as object orientation is in Java. A language designer should have
a better feeling for what is essential about a language and what is
trivial -- especially since he whines that people judge Perl too quickly
based on its dollar signs. If we were as fair to Perl as he is to Python
we would call it "Perl: the curly bracket and dollar sign language."

I consider it a compliment that he can't find anything real to point out
as Python's contribution to language fascism but I also find it
distressing that he feels the need to sow the seeds of fear, uncertainty
and doubt in the minds of would-be Python users. The Python feature that
most of us (in retrospect, unnecessarily) worry about before trying Python
is the whitespace handling. Larry can only turn people off of Python by
suggesting that that is Python's central feature or philosophy.

This whole modern, postmodern distinction is bogus anyhow. Almost every
language designer has a bone to pick with history and they are all pushing
some meme. They are all "modern" in this sense. Perl's meme is that
lexical flexibility overrides all other concerns. 

It is "classically modern" for the promoter of an ideology (in this case,
TMTOWTDI) to disclaim adherence to an ideology and claim inspiration in
the natural world: "Capitalism is just how things work. Perl works just
like human languages!" It is also charmingly modern to ignore the
unintended consequences of ideology: unreadable code, expensive
maintenance, wasted money and wasted time. Just as with communism, the
difficulty of truly measuring productivity will hide the problems for a
while but eventually the house will topple.

Now compare a Wall interview to one with Guido. Does Guido point to some
overriding ideology that makes Python great? Object Orientation? TMTOWTDI?
Whitespace? He promotes Python as a nice language that tries to
incorporate many neat features from other languages, to remain easy for
beginners and to scale nicely to complex problems. There is no single
dominant philosophy similar to TMTOWTDI that drives Python's growth. Or
one might say that Python's dominant philosophy is Aristotle's Golden
Mean. Or perhaps Python's philosophy is that code is communication and
readable code is clear communication. But even so, Python has many
features that exchange readability for flexibility...

I truly think that Perl is a unique and innovative language. Larry can
promote it without playing on people's fears of whitespace and fascism.

-- 
 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
 http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

"Silence," wrote Melville, "is the only Voice of God." The assertion,
like its subject, cuts both ways, negating and affirming, implying both
absence and presence, offering us a choice; it's a line that the Society
of American Atheists could put on its letterhead and the Society of
Friends could silently endorse while waiting to be moved by the spirit
to speak. - Listening for Silence by Mark Slouka, Apr. 1999, Harper's