Perl is worse! (was: Python is Wierd!)

[Alex Martelli]

"Grant Edwards" <nobody at nowhere.nohow> wrote in message
news:QPLg5.2816$6E.738549 at ptah.visi.com...
> On Sat, 29 Jul 2000 19:52:54 GMT, Suchandra Thapa
<ssthapa at midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> >Alex Martelli <alex at magenta.com> wrote:
>
> >>It matters if you care about how easy/hard it is to turn those
> >>"non-programmers" into "programmers in the language you
> >>are designing".  E.g., the CP4E project, which used to be
> >>aimed at turning _everybody_ into programmers, had better
>
> >    Actually I think it would be easier for non-programmers to
> >learn a language if it has strict typing.
>
> I concur. In non-programming, life is strictly typed. Allowed
> operations are determined by the type of the object. You can't
> make a phone call on a waffle-iron.  Were I to _try_ to make a
> phone call on a waffle-iron, it doesn't "automagically" convert
> istelf into a telephone.  Instead, I get a rather interesting
> burn pattern on the side of my head.

However, there are actions, such as buying and selling, which
you can apply to objects (and many non-objects...) uniformly.

Marx denounced this specific issue as the "mercification" of
reality perpetrated by capitalism, but, while there is a
point in this, it's myopic in a wider context -- many other
actions (transporting, talking-about, wrecking, ...) are
similarly polymorphic in just about any cultural-reality.

> You can tune a piano, but you can't tune a fish...

But you can tune a program, a car, a radio.  Yes, reality IS
strongly typed (in the Python way: typing attaches to the
underlying objects, not to the labels [words] currently bound
to them), but in a 'multiple-inheritance' (multiple-roles,
multiple-interfaces) way.


Alex