> > Wouldn't it be easier just to use the --prefix option in GiP?
> You elided the part where I said I also moved the subtitles into a different folder than the program. Well, you could still use the --prefix option to get the name right from the word go, but each to his own ... See below for further OT discussion, otherwise feel free to ignore ... www.macfh.co.uk/CEMH.html > > > Python, by stark contrast [to Perl], is extremely clean and readable due to its use of semantically meaningful indentations. > > It has some major problems ... > > > > The first you have mentioned as an asset, but said semantically meaningful indentation has some disadvantages too - it is, AFAIAA, unique, and thus confuses programmers coming from other languages, and it is possible to be confused by spaces where the rest of the program has been written with tabs, and vice versa, and such problems can be non-obvious to spot, and further it is impossible to crunch, though I admit this latter problem can largely be offset by pre-compilation. > The benefits far outweigh the (very slight) initial learning curve for people knowledgeable in other languages, and for beginners the more readable code they immediately produce helps enormously. I've taught introductory programming in C and Python and observed the benefits first hand. But that's not saying much, since C is hardly an "Introductory Programming Language", so you're comparing apples with pears. In the long-ago original discussion, I don't recall anyone even suggesting that C/C++ was an introductory language, let alone put it above Python for this purpose. IIRC, the comparisons were between BASIC, Pascal, PERL, and Python. > > Secondly, particularly to anyone used to more mainstream OOP languages such as C++ or Java, its object-oriented syntax is just horrible. I have to look it up anew every time I want to create an object. > Sorry, but that's just you. It's trivially simple, IMO. But we all, myself included, tend to suffer from "baby duck syndrome", and like what we learned first, or at least early on. What I learned first was BASIC, Assembler, Pascal, COBOL, and 123 macros, coming to C/C++ and Java comparatively late in life, so your, even though you have applied them equally to yourself, patronising and condescending baby-duck assumption just doesn't fit. You'd do better to answer the criticisms raised, rather than make incorrect assumptions which just make it appear as though you haven't got a valid argument in reply. > > Thirdly, again particularly to anyone used to C or Java, its syntax for conditional assignment is uniquely weird, and always I have to check that I've remembered it aright. > Ditto. Ditto. > > Fourthly, there is the confusion between when to use arrays, and when to use sequences, the confusion of syntax differences between the two, and the syntax to create arrays is uniquely obscure, to say the least. > Ditto. Ditto. > > Fifthly, its documentation is poor, finding help on any of the above points may take some time. > Now that's just silly. We all have our preferences, and that's fine and good, but saying the documentation for Python is poor is flat out wrong. The help file installed alongside Python in Windows, which is all that you've got to go on if you're offline, is piss-poor. Searches never find the sort of information that you're trying to look up straight off, usually you have to wade through many irrelevancies to find anything useful at all. > Between python.org/docs, stackoverflow.com, and simple Google searches > it is trivially simple to find answers to pretty much anything you could ever want to know about Python. But the last two of those are extra-Python sources, so the fact that you suggest that they are useful strengthens my point, not yours. > > I dare say I could find more, but that'll do for an OT post for now ... > Well, different strokes for different folks. Of course you should use what you like and are comfortable with. But please don't proclaim your personal preferences as some kind of inherent, basic truth. I've supported that truth by giving actual examples, which you chose to waive away and ignore. > Python is now the most commonly used introductory programming language > at US universities [1] So in previous eras was BASIC! Taken together, I don't think either fact proves very much! _______________________________________________ get_iplayer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/get_iplayer
