On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 1:19 PM, Brian Wall <kc0iog at gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 12:43 PM, Steve Cayford <strayf at freeshell.org> > wrote: > > I would second the perl vote. One-liners, system administration, web > > applications, it runs the gamut and scales well. Just follow best > practices > > to keep code clean and manageable. > > I'll third perl. The synax (mostly) makes sense, and you have the > option to precompile or not. I wrote a really weird app for work in > Perl (my first REAL coding project) and I really like coding in it. > Much more than PHP, which isn't bastardized perl so much as just a bad > idea. > > > Python was all the rage for awhile, and has some really nice > characteristics. After writing an app in perl I really didn't feel > like changing course and re-writing the whole thing in python because > someone told me it was better. Again, YMMV. I really don't know > why/if python is awesome. > > It's not any less of a rage. A few years ago at OSCON I saw a graph of O'Reilly book sales. Back when OSCON first started (OSCON used to be the Perl Conference) it was all about Perl. But in recent years book sales have surged for Python and Ruby and I believe that likely correlates closely to the mindshare each language has (though of course you can't see how many people purchased books in all three). Support for object oriented programming was bolted onto perl after the language had been around for awhile. Python was designed from step-1 with object orientation in mind. That's why it's implementation is cleaner. Someone remarked it's important to know best practices in Perl to write good, maintanable code. Perl let's you do things many ways, but it's not always obvious what the best way is. And if you've ever found yourself in the middle of a "list context/scalor-context" dilemna in the middle of a complicated expresion... yeah. That's a special kind of hell unique to Perl. So part of Python's appeal is that a lot of those issues unique to perl's implementation don't get in the way of you expressing your thoughts. In short, often where Perl is kind of mesy - especially with respect to object oriented programming, Python is nice and clean. You just have to accept indentation (white space) matters. I also think Perl 6 was the worst thing to happen to Perl. Perl 6 was supposed to "fix perl" and make it better. At the same time they decided to write a generic scripted-language-runtime-system (Parrot) that would generically support Perl 6, Perl 5, Python, Ruby, whatever - you name it. Parrot languished and never manifested, Larry Wall published Apocalypse after Apocalypse, and it kept never really showing up. In fact, the best way to see Perl 6 in action was to include implementations of Perl 6 in Perl 5. So people had this feeling Perl 6 was never going to show up, and after while the Perl maintainers realized the best thing to do is just keep on incrementally improving and supporting Perl 5, which they do very well now. Meanwhile, they work on Perl 6, but I'm not sure why. I spoke to one of the perl release managers recently and he declared "What people never understood about Perl 6 was that it was a research project. It was never supposed to be 'the next perl'." That strikes me as revisionist history - I think Perl 6 WAS supposed to be the next big thing. Maybe Perl 5.64.00 will be Perl 6. Anyway, while Perl 5 languished and then caught it's stride again in the shadow of Perl 6, Python and Ruby really took off. Anyway, I don't mean to imply Perl is not useful - it's exceptionally useful. And powerful. I'm just explaining why I think many people (including myself) find Python very appealing and a refreshing change of pace. Cheers, -Rob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20100326/18741279/attachment.htm