A Mountain of Perl Books + Python Advocacy

John W. Stevens jstevens at basho.fc.hp.com
Tue May 9 13:46:42 EDT 2000


tony summerfelt wrote:
> 
> On 08 May 2000 19:11:22 -0400, David Bolen wrote:
> 
> > although perhaps doing so is not always of benefit for long
> > term maintainability and manageability.
> 
> this is a regular argument against perl programming. personally i think the
> point is moot, if you can program in perl, you can read your code.

This turns out not to be the case.  Most programmers who take a break
from Perl cannot read their own code when they come back to it.

Obviously, if you program in Perl on a regular basis and never take a
long break from it, this is less of an issue.

But all of the above is totally irrelevant.  What counts is: can anybody
else read it, understand it and maintain it?  The purpose of a program
is to communicate.  The primary purpose of the source code to a program,
is to communicate with human beings.

> i can
> still ready all the uncommented c code i wrote ten years ago :)

Have you ever taken a long break from C programming?

I would invite everybody to read Eric Raymond's article: "Why Python?" 
Honestly, I expected to see comments about it already in this news group
. . . but maybe I was just late, and missed the thread.

-- 

If I spoke for HP --- there probably wouldn't BE an HP!

John Stevens
jstevens at basho.fc.hp.com



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