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[François Pinard]

[Kragen Sitaker]

> IMHO, writing code in Perl is not an excuse for writing unmaintainable
> code.  I've been pretty impressed with Lincoln Stein's Perl code, for
> instance.  And writing code in Python is not a guarantee of writing
> maintainable code.

I've seen some horrible Python, and it was a shock to me, as I did not
thought it was possible to write so uglily in that language.

> But I think it's easier to write maintainable code in Python.

It seems that writing nicely scales better with Python than with Perl.
I wrote some big Perl systems, and worked with a huge Perl system written
by others.  I pay a lot of attention to my own style, and it was pretty
evident that the writers of the huge Perl system made very notable efforts
at keeping everything the cleanest they could.

But past a certain size, maintainability escapes language differences,
and is more a factor of overall system architecture.  However, for similar
architectures, Python legibility helps all over.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard