4 ms·

Steve may not be a medical doctor, but he is a programming language expert, so I really don't get your ad hominem refutation of what he said about Perl. Perhaps

by sreque 16y ago

Steve may not be a medical doctor, but he is a programming language expert, so I really don't get your ad hominem refutation of what he said about Perl. Perhaps you can comment on what he actually said, not who he is? Also, I think you missed the entire point of my post, including the example. I'm also not sure of how else to word it to help you get it. My point was that Perl requires you to deal with a host of issues that have nothing to do with solving your actual computing problem. One simple example of these many thousand idiosyncracies, which the article itself indirectly brings up, is Perl file handles. Even if you know the "modern" way of using them, you still had to go through the learning process to differentiate between the old and new styles, and you still have to commit a bunch of useless facts to memory. Worse, you may still encounter and have to deal with the old way in the wild! I love the description of the perl5i CPAN module at http://search.cpan.org/~mschwern/perl5i-v2.2.2/lib/perl5i.pm http://search.cpan.org/~mschwern/perl5i-v2.2.2/lib/perl5i.pm: "perl5i - Fix as much of Perl 5 as possible in one pragma" Why not use a language that lets you get stuff done faster, instead of a language that's been feature-patched to death to fix the terrible design flaws it began with?

chromatic 16y ago
Perhaps you can comment on what he actually said, not who he is? Certainly: that particular comment is irrelevant nonsense. There should also be a CPAN module called Python. Fix as much of perl 5 as possible in one new language! I expect better discussion from Hacker News.
- sreque 16y ago
  You're right about the Python comment, and I edited it out. However, I would also say that you've provided no discussion of value in your comments. I at least back up my statements with correct supporting arguments, even if I sometimes use overly strong language in making them.
  - chromatic 16y ago
    My point is simple: the past ten years of Perl development have changed the language and its ecosystem dramatically. You can still write Perl as you did in 2000 or 1994 or 1987, but the Perl community tends to use terms like "Modern Perl" and "Enlightened Perl" and "Perl Renaissance" to distinguish between code we know to be buggy and clunky and difficult to maintain and the code we write now that we know so much better. If you want to compare Python to Perl, compare Python 1.x to the ancient Perl that always comes up in these comparisons. (You may or may not deduct points from Python for breaking backward compatibility in the past near-decade.)
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - sreque 16y ago
      Then we don't have anything to argue about. I agree that modern Perl is a lot better than older perl, and that modules that fix perl, like perl5i, Coro, and Moose, enable you to write decent code using the language. I never tried to say otherwise. My point was, why bother, when you can use a language that doesn't need to be fixed in the first place? Life is so much simpler without all the extra accidental complexity.
      - chromatic 16y ago
        My point was, why bother, when you can use a language that doesn't need to be fixed in the first place? Because I'd rather have to add on Moose (something I can fix while remaining compatible with other libraries) than use a language in which variables automagically spring into existence (which I can't fix). Worse than that, while I'm sure that new Python 2 classes and metaclasses allow someone to write a better object system for Python, no one would ever use it. Thus my main non-syntactic gripe with Python is that the things I most want fixed either I can't fix and still have Python or no one in the Python community would ever support, because of the peer pressure to hew to one obvious way to do things.

by sreque 16y ago

chromatic 16y ago

Perhaps you can comment on what he actually said, not who he is? Certainly: that particular comment is irrelevant nonsense. There should also be a CPAN module called Python. Fix as much of perl 5 as possible in one new language! I expect better discussion from Hacker News.

sreque 16y ago
You're right about the Python comment, and I edited it out. However, I would also say that you've provided no discussion of value in your comments. I at least back up my statements with correct supporting arguments, even if I sometimes use overly strong language in making them.
- chromatic 16y ago
  My point is simple: the past ten years of Perl development have changed the language and its ecosystem dramatically. You can still write Perl as you did in 2000 or 1994 or 1987, but the Perl community tends to use terms like "Modern Perl" and "Enlightened Perl" and "Perl Renaissance" to distinguish between code we know to be buggy and clunky and difficult to maintain and the code we write now that we know so much better. If you want to compare Python to Perl, compare Python 1.x to the ancient Perl that always comes up in these comparisons. (You may or may not deduct points from Python for breaking backward compatibility in the past near-decade.)
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - sreque 16y ago
    Then we don't have anything to argue about. I agree that modern Perl is a lot better than older perl, and that modules that fix perl, like perl5i, Coro, and Moose, enable you to write decent code using the language. I never tried to say otherwise. My point was, why bother, when you can use a language that doesn't need to be fixed in the first place? Life is so much simpler without all the extra accidental complexity.
    - chromatic 16y ago
      My point was, why bother, when you can use a language that doesn't need to be fixed in the first place? Because I'd rather have to add on Moose (something I can fix while remaining compatible with other libraries) than use a language in which variables automagically spring into existence (which I can't fix). Worse than that, while I'm sure that new Python 2 classes and metaclasses allow someone to write a better object system for Python, no one would ever use it. Thus my main non-syntactic gripe with Python is that the things I most want fixed either I can't fix and still have Python or no one in the Python community would ever support, because of the peer pressure to hew to one obvious way to do things.