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A Mountain of Perl Books + Python Advocacy

Martijn Faassen m.faassen at vet.uu.nl
Sun Apr 9 19:39:03 EDT 2000 
Ken Seehof <kens at sightreader.com> wrote:
> Indeed.  I've noticed that while just about everyone who I've known who
> has tried python ends up liking it alot, there aren't many fanatics.  I define
> a fanatic as someone who is absolutely certain that their language is by far
> the best language for every possible application, and that other languages
> don't even deserve to exist.  Python programmers tend to acknowledge
> the positive qualities of other languages.

WRONGO! ALL UTHER LANGUZEZ SUCKZ!! PHYTHON IS THE BESTEST!!!!!1 FOR 
EVERYTHING AND I HATEZ M$ TUU!! NOBUDDY ECSPEXTS THE SPANNISH ENQIUSITOAN
HAHAHAHH! PHYTHON JOKE SPAM SPAM! <.75 WINK WINK NUDGE>!!!!!!!1

:)

Anyway, yeah, that's what I noticed in this newsgroup. Whenever someone asks
if Python is a good language Tim Peters tells them to check out Haskell, or
someone mentions Smalltalk or Scheme or Lisp or whatnot. It's rare that
people are being sent to C or C++ (unless it's for Python extensions) or
Perl though (but it does always get the 'good for fast text processing'
mention). It's nice to see so many comparisons between languages here.

> Perhaps this is partly because python borrows all the best stuff from many
> other languages rather than being built around some wild, revolutionary idea.

Well, but Perl isn't based on a wild, revolutionary idea either. It seems
to have borrowed from other languages far more, or at least it didn't cover
it up so nicely. Python is good in the way that it borrows stuff
in a fairly orthogonal way, so that it's easy to reason about its 
syntax and semantics.

Then again, I don't know if there are that many raging Perl advocates.

AN-EVERYBODY-SHUD-SING-OF-LIKE-THIS-LLY YR'S!!!!

Martijn
-- 
History of the 20th Century: WW1, WW2, WW3?
No, WWW -- Could we be going in the right direction?
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