On May 28, 2011, at 12:54 AM, DJ Delorie wrote: > > This is more anecdotal than anything else... > >>> I'm a Perl fan myself. >> >> (shudder) > > Just before I learned Perl (WAY before python existed, before perl 5 > even), my manager was talking to *his* manager about this nifty new > tool called "perl" that they just discovered. Apparently, their > metric for whether it was good or not was whether or not I knew how to > use it already ;-) > > "Does DJ know how to use it?" > "No" > "Why not?" > "He hasn't needed to yet."
My intro to Perl was about 20 years ago, when one of my Japanese colleagues asked me to bring a couple of copies of the Perl book over, because it was unavailable in Japan. So, I bought them at Quantum Books. I read one of them on the long plane flight. My impression then is the same as it is now: Perl is a crazy, complex, undisciplined shotgun marriage between AWK and sh. The contrast between the extreme discipline of AWK's design and Perl's sloppiness is striking. > > Shortly after, I needed it, so I learned it. It'll be the same with > Python, just like it was with Scheme. I'm a compiler engineer - > picking up languages is second nature to me. I've been a compiler engineer a couple of times, back when a lot of design discipline was needed (because without care, your code either wouldn't fit in memory, or would be intolerably slow from disk thrashing). A simple related project involved implementing structured flow control in an assembly language: that had long-lasting consequences (http://www.frankston.com/public/?name=ImplementingVisiCalc). And I've written code in dozens of languages (I lost count decades ago). I won't recommend FORTRAN II, METASYMBOL, SNOBOL3, PL/I, or FORTH for this job ;-) > > It happens that most of the Fedora infrastructure is all python > scripts anyway, so it's not a big deal if I have to learn it, it's > just that I've been using Perl so far and it always seems to have the > features I want. In this case, the key feature is: > > You can implement arrays of hashes, hashes of arrays, arrays of > arrays, and hashes of hashes. That's not a "feature" in my book: it's fundamental to this class of language. Composition. > > This feature, for exmaple, allows us to encode a complete gEDA project > (sch+pcb+whatever) in a single perl variable! No problem doing that in Python. Or even ECD BASIC in 1978. > > But as they say, if there's a way to do it in Perl, there's more than > one way to do it in Perl, so yes, the likelyhood of inconsistent > styles is very high. I can't imagine a sane *design* process for anything even moderately complicated in Perl. John Doty Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd. http://www.noqsi.com/ j...@noqsi.com _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user