a new Perl/Python a day

[François Pinard]

[Andy Gross]

> On Jan 10, 2005, at 12:11 AM, Scott Bryce wrote:

> >No. Perl may have some interesting idiosyncrasies

> I [...] still have to look at the documentation to remember that I
> need to type '$|' to turn buffering off.  Ditto for the rest of the
> perl line-noise syntax.

Behind each language, there is a culture.  The Perl man pages give many
mnemonic tricks to remember special variable names like the above, and
if you are willing to play the game the way it was written, you might
even have some fun at it, and easily be proficient at this "line-noise".

I did a lot of Perl for many years, and still appreciate what Perl is
(or at least was).  Python does not change Perl in my eyes.  However,
Python is significantly more legible and maintainable, the comparison
merely stresses the unreadability of Perl.  No doubt that I prefer
Python, but Python not being there, Perl would be quite useful to me.

-- 
François Pinard   http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca