Perl is worse! (was: Python is Wierd!)

[Alex Martelli]

"Jonathan" <theebh at yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:8losor$4bk$1 at nnrp1.deja.com...
    [snip]
> god - the whole thing now looks like a mess! I don't think i will ever
> bother using PERL again (unless it's a 5-10 lines kind of thing).
> Python's syntax now seem much 'cleaner' and intuitive. But then i guess
    [snip]
> But the irony now is that ZOPE will be 'opened' to PERL too. I have
> read through the 'debates' going on in the zope mailing list, but it
> still doesn't make sense - why allow Zope to be polluted by something
> that is clearly deficient? It's like allowing people to use sand
> instead of cement to build a house. (I haven't mastered Zope yet, so i

I may share your opinion of Perl (and, apparently, the rough outline of
your history with it -- after using it a lot in the past, I'm never going to
go back to it now that I've found out about Python), but I disagree with
your assessment of letting people use Perl for Zope as a "pollution"
of Zope.  People get strongly attached to certain programming
languages for all sort of reasons, be they good or bad, and it's not
necessarily a framework developer's job to wean them away from
them; if a framework can reasonably be made to support language
X, and a framework designer's goal is to make the use of his own
framework more widespread, then X should be supported if it has a
significant "constituency", and can thus add to the framework's user
base.  And this is clearly the case here.

People using Perl for web-related tasks are really legions (no
matter that most of them hardly master over 50% of Perl's awesome,
intricate complexity -- pragmatically, you CAN get things done, even
if once in a while a flying brick [from some part of the language that
remains obscure to you] hits you smack in the forehead).  Maybe they'd
be best advised to switch to Python, maybe not (I think they would, but
that's quite another issue); but language-advocacy is not necessarily
the framework developers' goal.

I will piously hope that the *internals* of Zope remain in bright, clean
Python (or C where needed, e.g. for speed purposes), but if that is
so, then no "pollution" ensues if, over that Python-base, one is allowed
to build superstructure in Perl, Visual Basic, Tcl, JScript, or whatever
your least-favourite language happen to be.

Think of it as a competitive advantage you will have, using beautiful
Python over beautiful Zope, over the unwashed masses misguidedly
using whatever other language (and/or web-framework)...:-).


Alex