Scripting question, [small programming question

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Wed May 25 18:19:09 UTC 2005


On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 11:20, Claude Jones wrote:
>  With an object oriented approach and a mentality that
> > says there's only one way to do things, you'll end up throwing out
> > working code that has years of testing behind it and repeating most
> > of the old mistakes yourself.
> >
> Interesting points. What about this argument that Python scripts are more 
> intuitive/readable? 

Since I can muddle my way though perl and can't make any sense at all
out of Python, I can say unequivocally that is not true for me.  I do
understand the point though, and if the main purpose of a program
is for someone else to read it, I would either not use perl or I'd
try to make it look like C, which works moderately well.  Perl is
meant to be easy to write which can have a side effect of allowing
styles that others may have trouble following. 

However, the very first thing I would check is whether on not someone
else had already done most of the work.  A vast amount of perl code
is already written and maintained in the CPAN repository so very
often you just have to install one or a few modules and write a
half-page of your own code that calls things in the right order.
Given the choice of maintaining that half-page of possibly obtuse
perl vs. hundreds of pages of home-grown Python, I'll take the perl.
Eventually, I'd expect java to overtake perl in code availability,
but I don't think it is even close yet and I don't know enough about
Python to know where to look or how to install someone else's packages.
For perl, see http://search.cpan.org/.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com





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