> It seems like you are using an appeal to reason with your collaborator and > that appeal is not working. I don’t have a suggestion for your specific case, > but you might consider what concerns/fears your collaborator might have for > sticking with perl; i.e. what is your collaborator's deeper > psychological/emotional reasoning.
I agree that rational arguments are probably not going to be effective in this case. It’s not so much which tool is better, but what he already knows. I think it is similar to how Greg feels about SVN vs git ;^) or miles vs kilometers or how emacs and vi become engrained in your fingers and you don’t want to switch. He is a super PERL hacker and has been doing it forever, so that is his comfort zone. I don’t mind so much if he uses it himself (though it makes it harder to collaborate on the same tools), but I just don’t want his students to be stuck in the same vortex. To some extent, it’s true that learning one language makes it easier to learn others. (I wrote a whole conference web registration system with PERL, and I have gone from Basic to Pascal to C to PERL to MatLab to Python + R). On the other hand, there are so many language-specific quirks in PERL with all the $_ business that it is probably the *worst* one to cut your teeth on. I will continue the battle... BTW, here were the results when I translated some of his PERL code to Python: Python version has 154 lines vs 261 (60%) 4623 characters vs 7351 (63%) 735 punctuation marks vs 1370 (54%) -Steve _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
