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0 pointskamaal8y ago0 comments

Perl is one of those languages, if you get used to the power of Perl it could be really hard to move to other C based languages.

I can only imagine how it would be for anyone using Lisp. The power there is so much, going to something like Java from there would feel down right suffocating.

Going from Perl to Python in my case largely felt like trying to a run a marathon in chains.

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bhaak8y ago

Your comment made me think of the quote by Guy Steele: "We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."

Even the designers of Java didn't expect programmers to go from Lisp to Java.

bhaak8y ago

> Going from Perl to Python in my case largely felt like trying to a run a marathon in chains.

I find that not surprising. Python is geared a specific type of programmers. If Perl fits your programming, you will feel constrained by Python.

Me personally, I never liked Perl that much. IMO it's not a programming language but a write-only brain dump.

But Ruby is to me what Perl is to others. It's combining the power and expressiveness of Perl with a consistent OO model like Smalltalk and with a sane syntax.

vidarh8y ago

Ruby syntax is really quite insane. It's just that the insanity is contained in dark corners that most of us thankfully rarely have to deal with. Consider for example that this is the literal string "x": '% x '. So is % + linefeed + x + linefeed, because for most characters the character after a prefix '%' will be the quote character of a quoted string. And that includes whitespace.

There's all kinds of crazy little bits like that littered around Ruby.

It's still my favorite language, but it is also totally infuriating sometimes.

kamaalOP8y ago

Indentation in itself never helps readability that much. Unless of course you are hiring programmers so bad, who can't do things as basic a thing as indenting code. And I seriously doubt such programmers will automatically transform to geniuses just by using Python.

Apart from that I haven't seen any thing in Python that makes code more readable.

vgy7ujm8y ago

I share your experience. Python took all the fun out of computing for me.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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bhaak8y ago

Your comment made me think of the quote by Guy Steele: "We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."

Even the designers of Java didn't expect programmers to go from Lisp to Java.

bhaak8y ago

> Going from Perl to Python in my case largely felt like trying to a run a marathon in chains.

I find that not surprising. Python is geared a specific type of programmers. If Perl fits your programming, you will feel constrained by Python.

Me personally, I never liked Perl that much. IMO it's not a programming language but a write-only brain dump.

But Ruby is to me what Perl is to others. It's combining the power and expressiveness of Perl with a consistent OO model like Smalltalk and with a sane syntax.

vidarh8y ago

There's all kinds of crazy little bits like that littered around Ruby.

It's still my favorite language, but it is also totally infuriating sometimes.

kamaalOP8y ago

Apart from that I haven't seen any thing in Python that makes code more readable.

vgy7ujm8y ago

I share your experience. Python took all the fun out of computing for me.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse