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D - Perl - darkness to light

reply Mark Evans <Mark_member pathlink.com> writes:
I wrote,


 Perl wizards ... think Perl, and only Perl, offers what it offers.


Eric S. Raymond, the well known open-source luminary, demonstrates the truth of
that assertion, but manages to overcome the odds anyway.  This is his own story
of escape from the Perl cave.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3882s
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/python-list/1323993

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" describes Sirius Cybernetics products:
"... it is easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense
of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.  In other words ...
their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design
flaws."

Perl is popular, and so is junk food.

Mark
Feb 27 2003
parent reply Bill Cox <bill viasic.com> writes:
Mark Evans wrote:

 I wrote,
 
 

Perl wizards ... think Perl, and only Perl, offers what it offers.


 
 
 Eric S. Raymond, the well known open-source luminary, demonstrates the truth of
 that assertion, but manages to overcome the odds anyway.  This is his own story
 of escape from the Perl cave.
 
 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3882s
 http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/python-list/1323993
 
 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" describes Sirius Cybernetics products:
 "... it is easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense
 of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.  In other words ...
 their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial
design
 flaws."
 
 Perl is popular, and so is junk food.
 
 Mark


Hi, Mark.

Perl is a language for the masses.  Python is a language for you and me. 
  Well... probably not even me.

I have to write an enourmous Perl script in the next few months to do 
some grungy text manipulation.  My client wants Perl, so his guys can 
work on it when I'm done.  If I tried to use Python, I'd probably loose 
the whole deal.  I possibly hate Perl more than any other human being... 
  In some ways, it really sucks to be me.

Bill
Feb 28 2003
next sibling parent reply anonymous <anonymous_member pathlink.com> writes:
In article <3E5F4A5E.6060006 viasic.com>, Bill Cox says...

Mark Evans wrote:

 I wrote,
 
 

Perl wizards ... think Perl, and only Perl, offers what it offers.


 
 
 Eric S. Raymond, the well known open-source luminary, demonstrates the truth of
 that assertion, but manages to overcome the odds anyway.  This is his own story
 of escape from the Perl cave.
 
 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3882s
 http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/python-list/1323993
 
 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" describes Sirius Cybernetics products:
 "... it is easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense
 of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.  In other words ...
 their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial
design
 flaws."
 
 Perl is popular, and so is junk food.
 
 Mark


Hi, Mark.

Perl is a language for the masses.  Python is a language for you and me. 
  Well... probably not even me.

I have to write an enourmous Perl script in the next few months to do 
some grungy text manipulation.  My client wants Perl, so his guys can 
work on it when I'm done.  If I tried to use Python, I'd probably loose 
the whole deal.  I possibly hate Perl more than any other human being... 
  In some ways, it really sucks to be me.

Bill


You may not like Perl, but Perl is a vast improvement over sed and awk and
previous scripting languages.  It had a lot of features such as scalars and
hashes and sigils and regular expressions built into the language.  In fact it
is much more ambitious and revolutionary in scope and scale than Python as there
wasn't much before it.  

Perl begat the script wars.  A war fought between the language Gods and there
children and disciples.  Scripting languages are like a religion with adherents.
Some languages have cults.  There is the Cult of the Serpent and the Cult of
Wall and the Cult of Ruby.  Language begat religion.  The language Gods could 
add words or remove them and define language or remake a religion.

Perl is more popular or widely used than Python and Python is probably inspired
by Perl or inspires to be Perl.  Python is the up and comer, the challenger.
Perl is kind of a standard everyone aspires to improve upon. After Perl there
was a lot of new development with scripting languages such as PHP and Python and
Ruby.  

Perl also is designed by linguists and borrows from linguistics.

There is a difference between generalist langauages and niche languages.
PHP focuses on web development and Ruby and Python and Perl try to provide
different functionality.
Feb 28 2003
next sibling parent reply Bill Cox <bill viasic.com> writes:
Hi, Mark.

Perl is a language for the masses.  Python is a language for you and me. 
 Well... probably not even me.

I have to write an enourmous Perl script in the next few months to do 
some grungy text manipulation.  My client wants Perl, so his guys can 
work on it when I'm done.  If I tried to use Python, I'd probably loose 
the whole deal.  I possibly hate Perl more than any other human being... 
 In some ways, it really sucks to be me.

Bill


 
 
 You may not like Perl, but Perl is a vast improvement over sed and awk and
 previous scripting languages.  It had a lot of features such as scalars and
 hashes and sigils and regular expressions built into the language.  In fact it
 is much more ambitious and revolutionary in scope and scale than Python as
there
 wasn't much before it.  
 
 Perl begat the script wars.  A war fought between the language Gods and there
 children and disciples.  Scripting languages are like a religion with
adherents.
 Some languages have cults.  There is the Cult of the Serpent and the Cult of
 Wall and the Cult of Ruby.  Language begat religion.  The language Gods could 
 add words or remove them and define language or remake a religion.
 
 Perl is more popular or widely used than Python and Python is probably inspired
 by Perl or inspires to be Perl.  Python is the up and comer, the challenger.
 Perl is kind of a standard everyone aspires to improve upon. After Perl there
 was a lot of new development with scripting languages such as PHP and Python
and
 Ruby.  
 
 Perl also is designed by linguists and borrows from linguistics.
 
 There is a difference between generalist langauages and niche languages.
 PHP focuses on web development and Ruby and Python and Perl try to provide
 different functionality.


I don't mean to bash Perl.  It is loved by a great many people, many of 
them smarter than me.  I have respect for the guys who can make it do in 
a manner of minutes what would have taken me hours with awk, sed, and grep.

It just rubs me the wrong way, is all.  It has so many features, I can't
remember them all.

Bill
Feb 28 2003
parent "Mike Wynn" <mike.wynn l8night.co.uk> writes:
 Perl is more popular or widely used than Python and Python is probably




inspired

 by Perl or inspires to be Perl.  Python is the up and comer, the




challenger.

 Perl is kind of a standard everyone aspires to improve upon. After Perl




there

 was a lot of new development with scripting languages such as PHP and




Python and

 Ruby.

 Perl also is designed by linguists and borrows from linguistics.

 There is a difference between generalist langauages and niche languages.
 PHP focuses on web development and Ruby and Python and Perl try to




provide

 different functionality.


 I don't mean to bash Perl.  It is loved by a great many people, many of
 them smarter than me.  I have respect for the guys who can make it do in
 a manner of minutes what would have taken me hours with awk, sed, and


grep.

 It just rubs me the wrong way, is all.  It has so many features, I can't
 remember them all.


if you could you'd have little space in your brain for anything else :)

and lets not forget TCL  (personally I find it more obscure than perl
athough its does not look quite a bad).
is it just the opposite philosophy. Perl does what you want (more implict
features than even the designers can rember) and Python where everything is
explicit. that makes Python uses seem to have such hatred for Perl,
I find is analagous to religion there seems more competition between the
grandchildren of algo, than between them and algo's rivals grandchildren.

D has implicit features, and there is not way (within the lang) to describe
the class struct (the struct vtble changes for each class).
this is just that !

and what about LUA for embedding into an app its better than any other lang
I know (so far) I think a scheme/soid parser/interpreter might be smaller
but algo derived langs have less brackets.
Feb 28 2003
prev sibling parent reply Ilya Minkov <midiclub 8ung.at> writes:
anonymous wrote:

 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" describes Sirius 
 Cybernetics products: "... it is easy to be blinded to the 
 essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get
 from getting them to work at all.  In other words ... their 
 fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their 
 superficial design flaws."






Oh, it's wonderful, over and over it spends us single lines and whole
passsages to apply to every possible subject. :) I'm being often called
a paranoid android. Guess why.


 You may not like Perl, but Perl is a vast improvement over sed and 
 awk and previous scripting languages.  It had a lot of features such
 as scalars and hashes and sigils and regular expressions built into
 the language.  In fact it is much more ambitious and revolutionary
 in scope and scale than Python as there wasn't much before it.


First, python and perl are about equally old. Just perl is more of a
hacker's design - it was a "simple" sed&awk replacement, but gradually
grew into something of vast power, while python developers tried to do a
fundamental design. Not that i'd consider it perfect.

Perl syntax is C-ish. Not at all python. i'd consider it more
innovative. At first i was afreid of it forcing formatting, but one day
as i was counting my parenthesis in C... i just wished it would force
it. Sure, it can be done with utilities. But i guess it also simplifies
parsing and saves some lines of code. BTW, i thing C parenthesis are
simply harder to keep track of than of keywords like begin...end. Basic
collects all of the bad: it forces lines, but doesn't force identation.
Bleah.


 Perl begat the script wars.  A war fought between the language Gods 
 and there children and disciples.  Scripting languages are like a 
 religion with adherents. Some languages have cults.  There is the 
 Cult of the Serpent and the Cult of Wall and the Cult of Ruby. 
 Language begat religion.  The language Gods could add words or remove
 them and define language or remake a religion.


C++ is also a cult. Really. It just needs a strong opposition to prove
it, which has not been there till recently. :) There are lots of people
who hate it, and lots who adore it.


 Perl is more popular or widely used than Python and Python is 
 probably inspired by Perl or inspires to be Perl.  Python is the up 
 and comer, the challenger. Perl is kind of a standard everyone 
 aspires to improve upon. After Perl there was a lot of new 
 development with scripting languages such as PHP and Python and Ruby.


Again, ruby is a new language, while python and perl are over 10 years
old. They simply have different basic ideas, although they've
(surprisingly) finally scaled to a similar application field. They are
not inspired by each other in general, but you know, every language
designer tries to inspire himself from *all* existing languages.


 Perl also is designed by linguists and borrows from linguistics.


Doesn't make much of this impression though... Daniel doesn't call
himself a "linguist", but i guess a language he designs seems to make
lots of sense in its domain. Walter is not a "linguist" either. It's
more a question of common sence and experience, and of course luck,
because this field is not 100% studied.

It's not that i'd be "against" perl, but i guess python has had enough
luck to evolve to what it has been designed to be, perl has not. Larry
Wall wishes he had been more fundamental from the beginning on, but
noone could know it back then... Now, perl6 might be better.


 There is a difference between generalist langauages and niche 
 languages. PHP focuses on web development and Ruby and Python and 
 Perl try to provide different functionality.


Makefile language. :) No, perl6 will cover all the python's functionality.

-i.
Feb 28 2003
parent anonymous <anonymous_member pathlink.com> writes:
In article <b3onl6$b0r$1 digitaldaemon.com>, Ilya Minkov says...

anonymous wrote:

 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" describes Sirius 
 Cybernetics products: "... it is easy to be blinded to the 
 essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get
 from getting them to work at all.  In other words ... their 
 fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their 
 superficial design flaws."






Oh, it's wonderful, over and over it spends us single lines and whole
passsages to apply to every possible subject. :) I'm being often called
a paranoid android. Guess why.


 You may not like Perl, but Perl is a vast improvement over sed and 
 awk and previous scripting languages.  It had a lot of features such
 as scalars and hashes and sigils and regular expressions built into
 the language.  In fact it is much more ambitious and revolutionary
 in scope and scale than Python as there wasn't much before it.


First, python and perl are about equally old. Just perl is more of a
hacker's design - it was a "simple" sed&awk replacement, but gradually
grew into something of vast power, while python developers tried to do a
fundamental design. Not that i'd consider it perfect.

Perl syntax is C-ish. Not at all python. i'd consider it more
innovative. At first i was afreid of it forcing formatting, but one day
as i was counting my parenthesis in C... i just wished it would force
it. Sure, it can be done with utilities. But i guess it also simplifies
parsing and saves some lines of code. BTW, i thing C parenthesis are
simply harder to keep track of than of keywords like begin...end. Basic
collects all of the bad: it forces lines, but doesn't force identation.
Bleah.


 Perl begat the script wars.  A war fought between the language Gods 
 and there children and disciples.  Scripting languages are like a 
 religion with adherents. Some languages have cults.  There is the 
 Cult of the Serpent and the Cult of Wall and the Cult of Ruby. 
 Language begat religion.  The language Gods could add words or remove
 them and define language or remake a religion.


C++ is also a cult. Really. It just needs a strong opposition to prove
it, which has not been there till recently. :) There are lots of people
who hate it, and lots who adore it.


 Perl is more popular or widely used than Python and Python is 
 probably inspired by Perl or inspires to be Perl.  Python is the up 
 and comer, the challenger. Perl is kind of a standard everyone 
 aspires to improve upon. After Perl there was a lot of new 
 development with scripting languages such as PHP and Python and Ruby.


Again, ruby is a new language, while python and perl are over 10 years
old. They simply have different basic ideas, although they've
(surprisingly) finally scaled to a similar application field. They are
not inspired by each other in general, but you know, every language
designer tries to inspire himself from *all* existing languages.


 Perl also is designed by linguists and borrows from linguistics.


Doesn't make much of this impression though... Daniel doesn't call
himself a "linguist", but i guess a language he designs seems to make
lots of sense in its domain. Walter is not a "linguist" either. It's
more a question of common sence and experience, and of course luck,
because this field is not 100% studied.

It's not that i'd be "against" perl, but i guess python has had enough
luck to evolve to what it has been designed to be, perl has not. Larry
Wall wishes he had been more fundamental from the beginning on, but
noone could know it back then... Now, perl6 might be better.


 There is a difference between generalist langauages and niche 
 languages. PHP focuses on web development and Ruby and Python and 
 Perl try to provide different functionality.


Makefile language. :) No, perl6 will cover all the python's functionality.

-i.


Perl is 4 years older than Python. Perl 1.0 was released to Usenet in 1987 and
in 1991 Perl 4.0 was released.  Thats why Python has a simpler OO layer.  Perls
OO layer has a bolted on feel. Python was released in 1991.

Also Perl attempts to cram as much as it can into the syntax and runs out of
tokens to express the language.  Perl favors complexity.  Where the linguistics
comes in is just to illustrate how a methodology can influence the design of a
language.  Perl has a complex grammar with regular expressions and sigils to
denote hashes and arrays ect.  There is also Perl Poetry with which you can
write Poems in Perl. You can also borrow some items from syntax and grammar from
other languages.
Feb 28 2003
prev sibling next sibling parent anonymous <anonymous_member pathlink.com> writes:
In article <3E5F4A5E.6060006 viasic.com>, Bill Cox says...

Mark Evans wrote:

 I wrote,
 
 

Perl wizards ... think Perl, and only Perl, offers what it offers.


 
 
 Eric S. Raymond, the well known open-source luminary, demonstrates the truth of
 that assertion, but manages to overcome the odds anyway.  This is his own story
 of escape from the Perl cave.
 
 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3882s
 http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/python-list/1323993
 
 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" describes Sirius Cybernetics products:
 "... it is easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense
 of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.  In other words ...
 their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial
design
 flaws."
 
 Perl is popular, and so is junk food.
 
 Mark


Hi, Mark.

Perl is a language for the masses.  Python is a language for you and me. 
  Well... probably not even me.

I have to write an enourmous Perl script in the next few months to do 
some grungy text manipulation.  My client wants Perl, so his guys can 
work on it when I'm done.  If I tried to use Python, I'd probably loose 
the whole deal.  I possibly hate Perl more than any other human being... 
  In some ways, it really sucks to be me.

Bill


You may not like Perl, but Perl is a vast improvement over sed and awk and
previous scripting languages.  It had a lot of features such as scalars and
hashes and sigils and regular expressions built into the language.  In fact it
is much more ambitious and revolutionary in scope and scale than Python as there
wasn't much before it.  

Perl begat the script wars.  A war fought between the language Gods and there
children and disciples.  Scripting languages are like a religion with adherents.
Some languages have cults.  There is the Cult of the Serpent and the Cult of
Wall and the Cult of Ruby.  Language begat religion.  The language Gods could 
add words or remove them and define language or remake a religion.

Perl is more popular or widely used than Python and Python is probably inspired
by Perl or inspires to be Perl.  Python is the up and comer, the challenger.
Perl is kind of a standard everyone aspires to improve upon. After Perl there
was a lot of new development with scripting languages such as PHP and Python and
Ruby.  

Perl also is designed by linguists and borrows from linguistics.

There is a difference between generalist langauages and niche languages.
PHP focuses on web development and Ruby and Python and Perl try to provide
different functionality.
Feb 28 2003
prev sibling parent Mark Evans <Mark_member pathlink.com> writes:
Perl is a language for the masses.  Python is a language for you and me. 


Python is easier for the masses.  Take the Eric S. Raymond challenge and try it.


I have to write an enourmous Perl script in the next few months to do 
some grungy text manipulation.  My client wants Perl...


Python has regex and Unicode.  Do your Perl solution, and then write a Python
equivalent.  Show the client both versions, and ask for extra cash if he wants
the Python code.  It may be an enlightening experience for both of you.


 The excitement I've seen in programmer's eyes as they read the
 [Perl] spec remind me of my children at Christmas.


A bit like the starving African children who are happy with broken
third-hand toys because it's all they've ever seen.


 I'd have to guess you're still in your youthful 20's.


Funny, I picture you in your early teens.  I'm 34.


 I envy your idealistic enthusiasm for language design. The real
 world is Dilbert Land.


We are not designing a language for Dilbert's company.  (If that's the goal then
I'm outta here.)


 Most Perl wizards aren't ignorant...  They CHOSE to be Perl wizards, and 
 would again knowing everything you know.


Right, typical cult behavior:  there is One Truth and the Ascended Masters will
yield to no other.

Mark
Feb 28 2003