Re: YAPAS (Yet Another Python Advocacy Story)

[Adam Turoff <ziggy@panix.com>]

dha wrote:
> Indeed.  Not only does he say 'Many other programs are written in a
> variety of illegible dialects within the family of languages called
> "Perl".', which is clearly incomprehensible (is that an oxymoron?
> :-), 

Let's be fair here.  There's beginner's "pidgin" Perl, journeyman
Perl, idiomatic Perl, guru Perl and Abigail Perl.  While the long
time perl programmer can understand a japh that uses $[, such code
is totally befuddling to the beginner, *AND THAT'S OK*.

> but he also presents this comment: 'C++ and Perl only make sense
> if you have a particular programming background.  If you did not come
> from the "Unix tradition", many of their conventions and idioms seem
> alien.'

I could do a better job of Devil's Advocate here if Paul Prescod
was clearer in what he was slamming.  :-)

Try and explain all of the magic behind open() if you expect that call
to open a file for reading *OR* writing.  This is obviously a unixism
in Perl:
	open (PIPE, "strings `which perl` | sort -u | cut -b1 | uniq -c |");

Of course, Perl offers a bunch of ways to do that operation, not all of
them requiring an understanding of shell syntax embedded in a Perl program.

I have no clue how C++ can be slammed similarly, except perhaps through
all of the magic incantations used to placate gcc to compile your program.

> I wonder if I should suggest he put that in his pipe and smoke it, or
> if that would be giving it more attention than it deserves... :-/

It'll be our loss. 

There's a lot of concern about Python in the Perl community these days.
perl-advocacy had a thread loosely based on the software carpentry 
competition that exceeded 200 messages in 3 days.

There is something attractive about Python.  If it's an innate
attraction, than we should walk away; I don't expect grey-bearded lisp
hackers to flock to Perl en masse.  OTOH, if Python has tapped into
some deficiency in marketing Perl, then it's up to us to fix the
problem or stop whining.

Z.

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