Re: YAPAS (Yet Another Python Advocacy Story)

["David H. Adler" <dha@panix.com>]

On Sun, Mar 05, 2000 at 05:25:56PM -0500, Adam Turoff wrote:
> 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*.

It is indeed ok.  It is, however not what he's saying.  Unless you're
trying to claim that people who don't use tortured sentence
constructions and ten-dollar words are speaking a 'dialect within the
family of languages called' "English" - a contention I would certainly
argue if you were trying to claim it was a meaningful distinction in
that kind of discourse.

> > 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.  :-)

Fortunately, I don't need to be.  :-)  My point was that I am at least
one counter-example to that claim.

> > 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. 

How so?  I merely meant pointing out what I find to be misconceptions
presented as facts in his piece.  C'mon, you know me... I'm not *that*
nasty... :-)

> 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.

Well, more like 160, and little of it dealt with the carpentry
competition directly.

> 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.

I would merely wish python to 'win' (if that means anything...) on its
own merits, rather than through disinformation.  *shrug*

dha

-- 
David H. Adler - <dha@panix.com> - http://www.panix.com/~dha/
perl -e 'print "Just another P$0-r-l hacker"'
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