4 ms·

You're not the last, and I feel the same way. Perl is popular enough that there is enough documentation out there, stable enough that all that documentation is

You're not the last, and I feel the same way. Perl is popular enough that there is enough documentation out there, stable enough that all that documentation is good, even if it's 20 years old, and niche enough that most of it is written by knowledgeable people. With Python, I first have to ensure that the page I'm reading is no more than 2-3 years old, then the copy and paste requires me to re-fix the code, since the syntax is too brittle to stand up to whitespace changes.

tzs 5y ago
> With Python, I first have to ensure that the page I'm reading is no more than 2-3 years old, then the copy and paste requires me to re-fix the code, since the syntax is too brittle to stand up to whitespace changes. I find that I also often have to re-fix the code because so many Python example writers present their examples as REPL sessions, with the code I want to actually copy littered with ">>>" prompts and the output from each individual line's execution.
jamal-kumar 5y ago
I never got why this was such a huge deal for people to do. In vim it's super easy to just select a bunch of text you've pasted in, elimiate all the whitespace with some << commands, and then select what you need to be indented and >> it back into place. Takes like 5 minutes top even for larger amounts of text... beyond that, what are you even doing copying and pasting that much in? That said I do like perl for many things python just isn't as elegant at and your comment about old documentation still staying fresh is pretty true
- singingfish 5y ago
  I was reading something about a particularly bad enterprise service bus product where I learned in the comments that everything being a global variable is OK, you just have to clean up after yourself when the job finishes. This comment strikes me as similar - here's a design decision that makes a simple task more complex, and error prone. Not that copying pasting large volumes is a good thing.
  - jamal-kumar 5y ago
    Idk... if it's all tabs v for visual mode, select text :%s/\t/ /g boom selected text to PEP8 standard from tabs same if it's spaced otherwise evenly (Interpreter will give you a hard time if it isn't and won't execute the script, so what even is it if not that). your tabstop settings set to this should be fine for the << >> method. It's really not that hard?
    - singingfish 5y ago
      It's still extra shitwork that has to happen because of other's design decisions, however small.

tzs 5y ago

> With Python, I first have to ensure that the page I'm reading is no more than 2-3 years old, then the copy and paste requires me to re-fix the code, since the syntax is too brittle to stand up to whitespace changes. I find that I also often have to re-fix the code because so many Python example writers present their examples as REPL sessions, with the code I want to actually copy littered with ">>>" prompts and the output from each individual line's execution.

jamal-kumar 5y ago

I never got why this was such a huge deal for people to do. In vim it's super easy to just select a bunch of text you've pasted in, elimiate all the whitespace with some << commands, and then select what you need to be indented and >> it back into place. Takes like 5 minutes top even for larger amounts of text... beyond that, what are you even doing copying and pasting that much in? That said I do like perl for many things python just isn't as elegant at and your comment about old documentation still staying fresh is pretty true

singingfish 5y ago
I was reading something about a particularly bad enterprise service bus product where I learned in the comments that everything being a global variable is OK, you just have to clean up after yourself when the job finishes. This comment strikes me as similar - here's a design decision that makes a simple task more complex, and error prone. Not that copying pasting large volumes is a good thing.
- jamal-kumar 5y ago
  Idk... if it's all tabs v for visual mode, select text :%s/\t/ /g boom selected text to PEP8 standard from tabs same if it's spaced otherwise evenly (Interpreter will give you a hard time if it isn't and won't execute the script, so what even is it if not that). your tabstop settings set to this should be fine for the << >> method. It's really not that hard?
  - singingfish 5y ago
    It's still extra shitwork that has to happen because of other's design decisions, however small.