Re: [Plug] Which scripting language?

["Michael W. Ryan" <mryan@netaxs.com>]

On Tue, 4 Jan 2000, Walt Mankowski wrote:

> "The very fact that it's possible to write messy programs in Perl
> is also what makes it possible to write programs that are cleaner
> in Perl than they could ever be in a language that attempts to
> enforce cleanliness."
> 	-- Larry Wall, Linux World 1999

I hope you understand when I suggest taking this with a grain of salt when
you consider that readability is, I believe, one of Perl's biggest
complaints and Larry didn't create the language.  The origin I was
referring to was the purpose to create quick, one-off scripts.

Also, it doesn't matter how much *potential* for readable code is there.
If you give people the means to write quickly by using hard-to-read code,
they'll still tend to do it.  Perl wasn't designed to be readable; it was
designed to let you do something quickly.  Python was designed to be
readable; it was determined that promoting readability was more important
than knocking off scripts in 5 seconds.

Michael W. Ryan, MCP, MCT     | OTAKON 2000
mryan@netaxs.com              | Convention of Otaku Generation
http://www.netaxs.com/~mryan/ | http://www.otakon.com/

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PGP public key available by fingering mryan@unix.netaxs.com (use -l opt)


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