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The whole language is all One Way To Do It-ified. It's fine, there's nothing wrong with it, I just always feel a lot more like I'm part of a creative process w
by leif 16y ago
The whole language is all One Way To Do It-ified. It's fine, there's nothing wrong with it, I just always feel a lot more like I'm part of a creative process when I'm working with perl, like it's this magic goop I can mush around and throw at anything and it'll do everything I can think of. With python, it feels more like I'm trying to fit my program into the python world, which is very nice and square and proper and everything works perfectly fine, except if I happen to want to do it the other way just for kicks, I can't. Or, worse, I can and the performance is crap for no obvious reason (or a very good obvious reason that should've been fixed ages ago by relaxing things just a little bit).
I used to be a real big python fan, now it just seems like too much training wheels. I like perl's weirdness: its global variables, implicit returns, gotos and loop labels, weird calling conventions that, while unexpected, are perfectly well documented and reliable, and _boy_ do I love its string support.
- Goladus 16y agoOk, I was sort of hoping for a more concrete example. Do you mean like not being able to use 'unless' constructs? Not having regular expression operators? Not being able to reference default variables like $_? What is an example of doing it "the other way"? I can usually find several different ways to do anything in Python, too. In fact I find this is true even for trivial things. For example, here are 4 ways to parse /etc/passwd and return a list of objects such that you can reference each value by the field name, for example: >>> passwd_data('/etc/passwd')[5]['shell'] '/bin/bash' 4 ways: http://pastebin.com/wPa5q7Mc http://pastebin.com/wPa5q7Mc