o-----------ooO--(- Important  Message -)--Ooo------------o
|                                                         |
| SAVE BANDWITH, SPACE, TIME & MONEY, REPLY WITH PRUDENCE.|
|                                                         |
o----=[ Penguin @ My - Linux ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ]=----o


Saodah, Cucu Tok Seman Ngoknget , rumah tepi sungai tu .
Sekarang ni sudah ada email secara percuma , [EMAIL PROTECTED] . 
Awak bila lagi ?               http://ikhlas.com
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Subject: keratan drpd url  http://www.byte.com/printableArticle?doc_id=BYT20000201S0001


   
   A Perl Hacker in the Land of Python
   By Jon Udell, Byte.com
   Feb 4, 2000 (9:03 AM)
   
   I'm a big fan of Perl, have done nearly all my Web programming in that
   language, and have attended all three annual Perl conferences. So it
   was a real change of pace to attend IPC8, the Eighth International
   Python Conference. And, I'll admit, it was daunting to be asked to
   give the keynote talk at the conference's very popular Zope track.
   (For more on the Python-based Zope web application server, see these
   BYTE.com articles: August 23, 1999, October 25, 1999, January 24th,
   2000.) Although my experience with both Python and Zope is far more
   limited than my experience with Perl, I've seen enough now to draw
   some interesting parallels and distinctions between the two languages
   and their respective cultures. Here, then, are some observations about
   these two wildly successful open-source scripting languages.
   
   Perl Is Bigger, But Python Is Growing Faster. The first Perl
   conference in 1997 drew about 1000 attendees; it's grown modestly
   since then. By contrast the Python conference -- though it drew only
   about 250 this year -- nearly doubled last year's attendance. If the
   two languages were politicians, Perl would be the well-known
   incumbent, and Python the challenger with momentum. Among the signs of
   Python's growing strength was the announcement, at IPC8, that
   ActiveState -- the company that's made its name supporting Win32 Perl
   and selling commercial tools based on it -- is moving into the Python
   space as well.
   
   The Two Languages Are Isomorphic In Most Respects. From 50,000 feet,
   Perl and Python are strikingly similar. Both are open-source products
   that can be built on Win32 and a wide variety of UNIX platforms. Both
   can be used in a purely procedural manner, or in an object-oriented
   way. Both manage memory automatically. Both support rich, dynamic data
   structures such as lists and associative arrays. Both come with
   extensive libraries of scripted and compiled extension modules that
   work with databases, graphics, networking, directory services, XML,
   and much more. Both are rooted in strong communities.
   
   Although Both Scripting Languages Can Be Used In Object-Oriented Ways,
   Python Is More Deeply Object-Oriented. For Perl, OOP was a bolt-on,
   not a built-in. Objects didn't arrive until the fifth incarnation of
   Perl. By contrast, OOP was built in to Python, not bolted on. That
   said, I'm not inclined to make as much of this point as some people
   do. Perl's object-orientation, though it has more of a blue-collar
   feel to it than Python's, can certainly get the job done. What may
   matter more is what's under the hood. Although to the scripter both
   Perl and Python can seem object-oriented, Perl in the guts of its
   interpreter is not object-oriented whereas Python is. Why does this
   matter? I can't speak from experience, because I've only written
   trivial Perl extension modules and never written one for Python, but
   those in the know tell me that Python's internal object-orientation
   vastly simplifies the chore of mating Python to other components which
   are, themselves, built with object-oriented technology. This may be
   one reason why, although there are more extension modules for Perl, a
   number of the newest or most interesting modules (e.g. those
   supporting WebDAV or wxWindows) are supported first, or best, on
   Python. Perl Celebrates The Notion That "There's More Than One Way To
   Do It" Whereas Python Celebrates Consistency And Uniformity. The
   single most surprising aspect of Python, from the perspective of C or
   Java or Perl or almost any other language, is that whitespace counts.
   Too many or too few tabs or spaces isn't just a formatting glitch that
   makes your script look less attractive on the page. Rather,
   inconsistent indentation is a syntax error that stops your script dead
   in its tracks. If Python's your first language, this may make perfect
   sense. If you come from C or Java or Perl it will seem very weird at
   first. I'm told most people adjust easily and quickly, and that's been
   true for me, probably because I've always been scrupulous about
   indentation anyway. Just because Perl's bytecode compiler doesn't care
   how statements line up doesn't mean that I don't. I rely on
   indentation to discern block structure. The Python way, I now realize,
   eliminates a whole class of errors that arise when a mis-indented
   program makes you mis-perceive its true block structure. In Python,
   what you see is what you get, and there are almost no choices about
   how you format your code. Python's inventor, Guido van Rossum, did not
   capriciously deny Python programmers the freedom to format code in
   different ways. He chose to do so because he believes it helps
   programmers read and understand not only their own code, but also --
   and crucially -- code written by other programmers. And indeed, the
   Python hackers to whom I spoke at the conference all agreed strongly
   with this view. They cherish Python's regular, uncluttered, and highly
   readable appearance. "Life's better without braces," was the motto at
   this year's conference.
   
   Perl has a rather different motto: "There's More Than One Way To Do
   It" (TIMTOWTDI, pronounced "TimToady"). Perl can be written lots of
   different ways. You can choose to observe rules like those Python
   enforces, but you don't have to. And this freedom extends beyond just
   formatting. In Perl there are, for example, several ways to reference
   an element of a list, or write the set of key/value pairs that define
   a hashtable.
   
   It's important to understand that Larry Wall is no more capricious in
   his desire to encourage this freedom than is Guido van Rossum in his
   desire to regulate it. Trained as a linguist, Larry Wall built Perl on
   the model of English. "Perl is a mess," he says, "and that's good
   because the problem space is also a mess." Wall believes that people
   think about things in different ways, that natural languages
   accommodate many mindsets, and that programming languages should too.
   
   While I continue to think that Larry Wall is right about this, there's
   no simple answer here, and with only months of Python experience to
   stack up against my years of Perl experience, I can't really make a
   fair judgement. I think it's good, though, that Python challenges me
   to examine some of my deeply-rooted Perl assumptions. There's nothing
   worse than an unexamined assumption! Python Is Designed To Be A Good
   First Language For A Beginning Programmer, Whereas Perl Is Most Useful
   To Programmers Familiar With C, Sed Or Awk, And UNIX Command Idioms.At
   the conference, Guido van Rossum spoke about a project called Computer
   Programming for Everybody. He aims to craft a subset of Python, and a
   set of educational materials related to it, so that Python can be to
   the next generation of programmers what Pascal was to mine: the
   language that's used to teach first-time programmers. As much as I
   admire Perl, I would never recommend it to a beginner. Perl should be
   your third or fourth language, not your first. Python, even in its
   current form, would be a reasonable first choice. The path from the
   simplest script, through structured programming, on to objects, and
   thence to large systems, is quite smooth.
   
   In fairness to Perl, I was productive in the language almost
   immediately, and long before I mastered things like references,
   objects, and power tools like Perl's amazing map function, which
   applies a function to every element of a list. (Yes, in case you're
   wondering, Python has a map function too.) But then, I came to Perl
   after Pascal, Lisp, C, Ada, C++, and a few other languages. It's hard
   for me to imagine how Perl would have appeared to me as a first
   language, but my sense is that Python would have been an easier place
   to start. Certainly the Python community, as a whole, seems to take a
   genuine, life-cycle-oriented interest in the development of a
   programmer.
   
   Perl Is more Powerful And More Mature In Some Ways. Despite Python's
   growing strength and popularity, Perl remains the gold standard for
   scripting in many respects. For regular-expression-based
   text-processing, I'll take Perl any day, even though Python in recent
   years has gotten faster at this, and has switched to a Perl-5-like
   regex syntax.
   
   The Python community hasn't yet matched Perl's CPAN (Comprehensive
   Perl Archive Network), a masterfully organized compendium of Perl
   extension modules. Likewise, Python has yet to match Perl's standard
   methods for building modules and packaging them for distribution. A
   new Python initiative called Distutils is attacking this problem, and
   it's inspired by Perl's MakeMaker, a module that enables Perl
   programmers to build standard modules for distribution on CPAN.
   
   Perl's database support is broader than Python's. Championed by Tim
   Bunce, Perl's DBI/DBD (database interface, database driver) mechanism
   has been a strong standard for years, and as a result, Perl
   programmers enjoy rich support for many different SQL databases.
   Python has a similar mechanism, but people in the Python community
   tell me that Python's DBI doesn't cover the wide swath that Perl's DBI
   does. Perl Lacks A Killer App; Zope Is Python's Killer App. Perl's
   been aptly called "the duct tape of the Internet" and in that sense,
   the Internet is Perl's killer app. Countless Web sites depend on Perl
   for the production of HTML, for the management of user databases, for
   the monitoring of mission-critical servers, and a thousand other
   chores. And yet...there's nothing in Perl space like Zope. By that I
   mean, there's no killer app that leads people to Perl in the same way
   that Zope leads people to Python. It's clear that Zope was one of the
   main reasons that this year's Python conference was twice the size of
   last year's. People who otherwise had no particular reason to want to
   learn Python (like me) found their way to the language not for its
   intrinsic properties, but because it's the engine of Zope.
   
   What's magical about Zope is that it looks, to users, like a
   content-management system with a simple Web interface that anybody can
   use. A non-programmer can manage a simple website, using Zope, with
   little training. Thanks to Zope's powerful object-oriented framework,
   it's easy to build such a site in an efficient and economical way,
   inheriting (or, in Zope-speak, acquiring) common elements from
   ancestral objects. Thanks to Zope's built-in object database, it's
   easy to restructure the site -- for example, by cutting a subtree of
   objects from one location and pasting it into another.
   
   Out of the box, in other words, Zope is a useful Web content manager
   for nonprogrammers. And then, when the site needs to grow more
   sophisticated, the afterburners kick in. There's a tag language called
   DTML (Document Template Markup Language) which, like Cold Fusion
   Markup Language or Java Server Pages or Active Server Pages, mixes
   HTML templates with programming instructions that can populate these
   templates with data drawn from SQL stores or Zope's own object
   database. When this mid-level programming environment runs out of gas,
   you can drop down to Python -- Zope's native implementation language
   -- to write powerful extensions that communicate intimately with
   Zope's internal machinery.
   
   It's a great model. Although Python zealots tend to attribute the
   success of Zope to the qualities of Python, I'm not so sure about
   that. As I've said, Perl and Python really aren't too different from
   50,000 feet. So how about it, Perl folks? Python has quite sensibly
   borrowed lots of great ideas from Perl. Here's a great idea that Perl
   ought to be borrowing from Python.
   
   Jon Udell (http://udell.roninhouse.com/) was Byte magazine's executive
   editor for new media, the architect of the original www.byte.com, and
   author of Byte's Web Project column. He's now an independent
   Web/Internet consultant, and is the author of Practical Internet
   Groupware, from O'Reilly and Associates. His recent Byte.com columns
   are archived at http://www.byte.com/index/threads.
   
-
Disclaimer : http://users.my-linux.org/disclaimer.html

Reply via email to