On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 11:20, Claude Jones wrote: > With an object oriented approach and a mentality that > > says there's only one way to do things, you'll end up throwing out > > working code that has years of testing behind it and repeating most > > of the old mistakes yourself. > > > Interesting points. What about this argument that Python scripts are more > intuitive/readable? Since I can muddle my way though perl and can't make any sense at all out of Python, I can say unequivocally that is not true for me. I do understand the point though, and if the main purpose of a program is for someone else to read it, I would either not use perl or I'd try to make it look like C, which works moderately well. Perl is meant to be easy to write which can have a side effect of allowing styles that others may have trouble following. However, the very first thing I would check is whether on not someone else had already done most of the work. A vast amount of perl code is already written and maintained in the CPAN repository so very often you just have to install one or a few modules and write a half-page of your own code that calls things in the right order. Given the choice of maintaining that half-page of possibly obtuse perl vs. hundreds of pages of home-grown Python, I'll take the perl. Eventually, I'd expect java to overtake perl in code availability, but I don't think it is even close yet and I don't know enough about Python to know where to look or how to install someone else's packages. For perl, see http://search.cpan.org/. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
