🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <JTV2J.96Feb12141346@mamba.cs.virginia.edu>,
John Viega <rust@Virginia.EDU> wrote:
>Tom Christiansen writes:
> | In comp.lang.perl.misc, rust@Virginia.EDU writes:
> | :There is no need to sacrifice power for ease of use and learnability.
> | :There are a handful of languages at least as powerful as Perl, and
> | :several times more readable.
> | 
> | Name them.
>
>Python, Icon, and ML all come to the top of my head.  Of course, since
>all languages have their strengths and weaknesses, it depends where
>you want your power.  As a general purpose more powerful language that
>is also easier to use than Perl, I'd also suggest any member of the
>Modula/Oberon family.  

Give me a break! These are systems programming languages intended for compiling
into machine language, not scripting languages. You can't even compare them to
Perl. You might as well tell people to code in C instead of Perl.

Do you have any idea what it would take to code a regular expression matching
module in Oberon from scratch compared to just writing /^[0-9]*/? 

Modula and Oberon support things like explicit datatypes, complex type
construction, pointers, etc. All the kind of concepts that a script writer
should not need to worry about.

In interpreted languages like Perl, you don't have to worry whether $myvariable
is a floating-point number, a string or an integer, and you don't have to worry
about where it is stored.

I think you are way off base even making such meaningless comparisons, which
casts a doubt on your credibility. That cute .sig blurb about polymorphism
won't easily redeem you!

>However, let us not overlook that both power and readability are a bit
>subjective.  What is obvious code to you might not be obfuscated to
>me, and vice-versa.

>But it still can say something about the language, especially if
>people complain in droves about how much the language detracts from
>readability, like people do with Perl.  I don't see many complaints
>about how easy it is to write hard to read Python programs.

That's because if you get your tabbing wrong, your block nesting won't be
understood by the damn thing. You couldn't write a Python program that looks
like a labyrinth, such as the well-known example from obfuscated C programming
which also generates a random labyrinth on standard output. That doesn't mean
that all programmers of languages like Perl or C are going to conspire to write
programs that look like labyrinths, name their variables with meaningless
names, or pull nasty tricks such as taking advantage of the little-known
commutatitivity of the a[b] array designator by writing expressions like
5["abcdefg"]

I think your droning about Python is getting a little obnoxious, considering
you aren't even posting to newsgroups that have anything to do with Python.

Why is this cross-posted to comp.lang.c? Do you seriuosly think that most
people reading comp.lang.java or comp.lang.perl give a damn?

Python is still in fairly early stages, whereas Perl is a mature language that
has been around for years. It was designed to help automate some UNIX system
administration tasks. I can find it on just about any UNIX installation that
has internet access. There is an accumulating body of software based in
Perl---such as majordomo, and that little "psnup" utility. Maybe you should
consider that before blindly suggesting that people drop everything and move
over to Python or Modula 2.

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