31–40 of 93 posts
Does anyone know of a similar experience for Perl?
"Perl has always considered itself primarily a programmer-centric language, while Python has always considered itself to be more institution-centric. So in a sense it's a bit dumbed down, much like Java. You'll note both of those languages make their greatest appeal to managers. :-) " Huh? I was using Python when Perl was more popular, and this seems completely fabricated. He's trying to lump Python in with Java, whi…
This kind of programming leads to Java's verbosity, where to read a file, you have to obtain an InputStream, so you use a FileReader, but you probably want to wrap in inside of a BufferedInputStream to get buffering, which you probably want to surround in a try-catch-finally to clean up exceptional states, which you're going to want to call readLines on until you run out of lines, which you want to put into a data structure that implements the interface List. None of these building-blocks are complex on their own. Furthermore, Java is about enforcing language restrictions from the programmer -- you must deal with checked exceptions before you can proceed, you must not clash types, you must provide an implementation of this abstract method, you must not access this private variable.
Meanwhile Python encourages 'pythonic' constructs, which are idiomatic ways of accomplishing a certain task; these are not unlike what Java programmers would call 'design patterns'. But Python is more lax than Java, and has a notion of 'we're all adults here' [1] towards OO.
Perl takes 'we're all adults' to a new level, providing a LOT of specialized syntax and sophisticated heuristics to squeeze more expressive power from expressions.
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/70528/why-are-pythons-pri...
"Perl has always considered itself primarily a programmer-centric language, while Python has always considered itself to be more institution-centric. So in a sense it's a bit dumbed down, much like Java. You'll note both of those languages make their greatest appeal to managers. :-) " Huh? I was using Python when Perl was more popular, and this seems completely fabricated. He's trying to lump Python in with Java, whi…
Why do you bother having opinions on subjects which you haven't followed for six++ years..? (Alternatively, a good criticism of Moose/CLOS?)
>Why isn't PERL more windows friendly? Really? I've had tons of fun with Perl+OLE automating the processing of Excel and Word files.
Same; I've always had more problems with Python on Windows, rather than Perl. With Perl 5, both ActiveState's and Strawberry Perl just worked, whereas Python can't even print to the console [1] without workarounds or an extra library that's not installed by default. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5419/python-unicode-and-t...
I've never heard the term 'frog-boiled' before, but it's the most succinct description of PHP I've ever heard.
I wish I had his code and programming abilities. He seems like such an interesting guy. Every once in a while Perl6 comes up. I read about it, and like Perl 5 but more so (at least Perl 5 I have used from time to time), but it seems like such an impressively rigorous build-up of work by hardcore veterans. Most of his jokes come off as sarcastically arrogant, and I enjoy how he pokes fun at his work and himself. I only kind of worry about the Perl Jam security talks his "doctor it hurts when I laugh" retort, because malicious doctors force you to laugh all damn day and steal PII and run up your bills online with malicious transactions. I do not want to dismiss TIMTOWTDI, but if you have a limited set of bad ways to do it, you cannot expect people to ignore it. This shows a weird kind of idealism to me in the one area we know idealists do not lurk.
Jokes aside, I will always see him in a special light. If only I could honor him better by churning out some Perl!
"Perl has always considered itself primarily a programmer-centric language, while Python has always considered itself to be more institution-centric. So in a sense it's a bit dumbed down, much like Java. You'll note both of those languages make their greatest appeal to managers. :-) " Huh? I was using Python when Perl was more popular, and this seems completely fabricated. He's trying to lump Python in with Java, whi…
The power that comes from "more than one way to do it" in Perl is great for an individual programmer that wants to create his own custom tool box, but it can cause difficulties in an organization with people at different skill levels all working on the same code base.
By the way, you see similar issues with Common Lisp. It is great for individual power programmers, but it seldom catches on for something that has to scale way beyond one programmer. As a contrast, look at Go, which was, as Larry Wall would say, "dumbed down" to meet the institutional needs of Google.
I know a lot of Hacker News types would rather think of themselves as power programmers rather than institutional types, but we shouldn't overly disparage the power of institutions to scale way beyond what a single individual can do, even though there can eventually be problems with bloat and mediocrity.
All this is to say that there is need and room in the world for programmer-centric and institution-centric tools. Larry has been helpful to point out the difference, and so people should think about these things when choosing between Python and Perl, for example. I work at a small school, and although I am a one-man programming shop, I do everything in Python in the hopes that if something happens to me, my successor will have an easier time understanding my code. I had done some work in Racket, Clojure, and Haskell, but then I thought about the future and converted everything to Python.
"Perl has always considered itself primarily a programmer-centric language, while Python has always considered itself to be more institution-centric. So in a sense it's a bit dumbed down, much like Java. You'll note both of those languages make their greatest appeal to managers. :-) " Huh? I was using Python when Perl was more popular, and this seems completely fabricated. He's trying to lump Python in with Java, whi…
Although I don't think of Python and Java as that similar, I do see what Larry is getting at. Python encourages "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it", which is very nice for institutions where multiple programmers have to work with the same code. The power that comes from "more than one way to do it" in Perl is great for an individual programmer that wants to create his own custom too…
But "Python has always considered itself institution-centric" is patently FALSE... as I said, if you were using Python 10+ years ago, when Perl was more popular, you would find that statement very surprising.
Paul Graham even wrote about this: http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html
"Perl has always considered itself primarily a programmer-centric language, while Python has always considered itself to be more institution-centric. So in a sense it's a bit dumbed down, much like Java. You'll note both of those languages make their greatest appeal to managers. :-) " Huh? I was using Python when Perl was more popular, and this seems completely fabricated. He's trying to lump Python in with Java, whi…
> What else is good about Perl, which is 1) not in Python/Ruby/JavaScript or 2) overly terse/clever? (Honest question) Scalar/list/hash context. It makes zero sense and the syntax seems to change randomly… until you understand it. Then contexts make a great deal of sense. Also, having dealt with a good deal of Python, I'm inclined to lump it in with Java too—less verbose and dynamically typed, but still focused on co…
Depends on who is writing, of course.
"Perl has always considered itself primarily a programmer-centric language, while Python has always considered itself to be more institution-centric. So in a sense it's a bit dumbed down, much like Java. You'll note both of those languages make their greatest appeal to managers. :-) " Huh? I was using Python when Perl was more popular, and this seems completely fabricated. He's trying to lump Python in with Java, whi…
> What else is good about Perl, which is 1) not in Python/Ruby/JavaScript or 2) overly terse/clever? (Honest question) Scalar/list/hash context. It makes zero sense and the syntax seems to change randomly… until you understand it. Then contexts make a great deal of sense. Also, having dealt with a good deal of Python, I'm inclined to lump it in with Java too—less verbose and dynamically typed, but still focused on co…
"This is the most important section in this chapter. In fact it's the most important section in the entire book."
"Not only that, but you can't make any general rules to apply what you know about some expressions to others. Each expression can make up its own rules. ... Perl is very much a language that tries to do the most common, mostly right thing for you."
"In fact, a big part of learning Perl is actually learning how Larry thinks. Therefore, once you can think like Larry does, you know what Perl should do".
Those quotes don't inspire confidence in me -- it sounds like a battalion of mostly correct special cases... mostly correct meaning "sometimes wrong". However, I do appreciate that the linguistic part of your brain is very large and powerful, and once you internalize all these rules they can lead to a beautiful expressivity. Larry is making use of a different part of your brain than other languages do.
But I have to work with 5 languages regularly, and I see this polyglot trend only increasing in the future. So I appreciate when languages are a little more predictable, and a few months away from them won't diminish my fluency.