age of new pythonistas [was: The Editor Poll results are in!]

[Ville Vainio]

pinard at iro.umontreal.ca (François Pinard) writes:

> > Ditto with TCL. When I see 8 backslashes in a row, I look elsewhere
> > ;-).
> 
> One may be rebuked by surface aspects, indeed.  But seriously, we have to

Number of backslashes is not a surface aspect - it shows how much you
have to escape stuff. Excessive escaping makes things
unpredictable. It's not at all about aesthetics.

> Even if I prefer Python to Perl, I would never even think that Perl is not
> well designed.  When I was using Perl, as a user (not as a reader of books
> about it :-), I found that Perl allowed me to quickly write my code, it
> was full of good ideas, and I felt the language quite fulfilled its promises.

I also thought that Perl initially felt neat, when doing simple
programs with it. But reading some books shows how dirty it actually
is. One doesn't really know all the evils of perl before reading books
about it. 

> make something necessarily bad.  And besides, wandering around a bit with an
> opened mind allows someone to improve its culture and to evolve his tastes.

Yes, that is definitely true: I'm glad I have taken cursory glance
over several very different, "rare" languages (functional, OO,
procedural), but I am less glad about the time I took to learn perl. I
mean, I gave the language a chance, and implemented several scripts
(cgi or not) with it, but I wish I didn't. It's kinda like the BASIC
many of us learned as kids, though I'm not sure whether the damage to
the brain is as severe.

For "real" programming, that is. I still use perl as awk&sed++. Which
is the way it was meant to be used in the first place. "Bad design"
can just mean a design with different goals.

-- 
Ville Vainio - http://www.tp.spt.fi/~vvainio - ICQ #115524762
 Wild geese have no intention to cast a reflection
 Water has no mind to assume their form