Why did Quora choose Python for its development?

[John Bokma]

"D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <darcy at druid.net> writes:

> On Tue, 24 May 2011 11:52:39 -0500
> John Bokma <john at castleamber.com> wrote:
>> >> > $d = @a;
>> >> 
>> >> That will give you the number of elements in @a. What you (probably)
>> >> mean is %hash = @array;
>> >
>> > If I was even considering using Perl, this one exchange would send me
>> > screaming in the opposite direction.
>> 
>> To me as silly as all those people who give Python a wide berth because
>> of significant whitespace. I am glad that I am not so limited in that
>> respect. To me programming languages are like writing systems used by
>> humans; each has its short comings and each has its beauty.
>
> My point was that even proponents of the language can make a
> significant error based on the way the variable is named.

And someone can't misspell dict, for example? Are we now going to judge
a language on a typo someone just made?

> When I first looked at Perl it looked like line noise.  When I first
> looked at Python it looked like pseudo-code.

When people who are used to a latin alpabeth look at Devanagari they
probably see scratches make by chickens. I saw beauty (and still see
it). To someone fluent in Devanagari the latin alpabeth might look like
Perl ;-).

Anyway, I have been exposed to pseudo-code a lot before I picked up
Perl, and yet, Perl somehow stuck with me. I learned about Python a
little later (IIRC), and have tried to pick it up several times over the
years that followed. Last year I have been more serious about picking it
up; and I even did some paid for work in it. I /can/ program in Python,
I do /like/ Python, but somehow I like Perl more; even when I am fully
aware of its shortcommings each time I use it.

As for line noise: very often it turns out that people mean the regular
expressions by this. But a similar dialect is used by many other
programming languages that I know of. The difference is that Perl has
dedicated operators for it.

A Perl programmer will call this line noise:

double_word_re = re.compile(r"\b(?P<word>\w+)\s+(?P=word)(?!\w)",
                            re.IGNORECASE)
for match in double_word_re.finditer(text):
    print ("{0} is duplicated".format(match.group("word"))

(p500 of Programming in Python 3, 2nd edition, any typos by me).

> Look, I couldn't care less what other people use.

In that case you're an exception here. Or maybe the weekly Perl bashers
are way more vocal here and drown people like you out. One thing I hate
about comp.lang.perl.misc is the ivory tower attitude there. One thing I
hate about comp.lang.python is the weekly Perl bashing; to me it makes
those people look like extremists (Pythonistas, what's in a word), and
to be honest, it does affect how I view Python.

> I just don't see any reason for someone to come into a Python group
> and start proselytizing about why their tool is better than ours any
> more than I would feel any need to go to a Perl group and start trying
> to convert them.

Yet it seems to be accepted behavoir here to weekly bash Perl...

> Bottom line - they did a study once (sorry, can't point to it any more)
> to determine the best tool for development.  Turns out that the most
> productive tool was generally the one that the user believed was the
> most productive.  In hindsight I think that that was rather obvious.

Doesn't surprise me. I did switch to Emacs a few years back (used
Textpad for many years) but I don't think I now produce more code /
hour. But I am able to do some things way easier compared to using
Textpad, and that gives me pleasure.

-- 
John Bokma                                                               j3b

Blog: http://johnbokma.com/        Perl Consultancy: http://castleamber.com/
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