python vs perl lines of code

[akameswaran at gmail.com]

I am trying to understand why Edwards post generated such a negative
response.  I am neither agreeing or disagreeing with his statement -
because I don't think he is making one. He posted a data point, and
asked others to post the samething.  About the only thing he could say,
is that for his coding style, Python appears to be more terse.  He went
out of his way to describe mitigating factors and didn't draw any
general conclusions.

It seems to me the discussion could actually be beneficial.  If several
different coders gave similar responses, ie code line/character count
comparisons, we might be able to see if there is a trend of any sort -
the more "anecdotes" given and we start to have trends - or maybe we
don't.

The UFO comparison is silly, UFO sightings being based on time and
space coordinates are inherently unreviewable.  Ed's code and his
analysis methods can be repeated (didn't say they were repeated, just
they can be).

Perhaps some ppl who switched from python to perl could do something
similar, reversing the skill bias Edward admitted too?  If we wanted to
pursue more study of the phenomenon we could choose some stylistic
rules about perl and python for test code, etc to help normalize the
data.

Lastly, Ed - can you post the code?  That may be putting your head in
the lion's mouth so to speak and make the whole thread even worse - and
your coding style will get shredded by perl advocates... ok nevermind
don't post it.'

Ok I'm going to end with a flamebait - but I would posit, ALL OTHER
THINGS BEING EQUAL - that a smaller number of characters and lines in
code is more maintainable than larger number of characters and lines in
the code.

<duck>