On Mon, Mar 03, 2014 at 11:21:02PM +0100, Szymon Olewniczak wrote: > […] I must admit that I've found Python much less harmful that I had > previously considered it to be.
Do you care about the language or a particular implementation? For the latter, packaging sucks, it has libraries to deal with real-world suck, it runs on sucky OSes. Python 2 is inferior language-wise vis-à-vis Python 3. > […] the code is readable and what is very important it simplify many > things. Do people on this list seriously consider using a language with inferior namespacing, a primitive error model, lack of sometimes useful purely functional constructs, certain data structures not in the standard library, a very primitive type system, weak typing, tedious and error-prone string manipulation, etc for performance-insensitive general purpose programming? I'm not advocating Python for memory, size, or execution time-sensitive code, where absolute control is important, or when you want low dependencies. > In addition it has many great libraries so why do not use Python at > least as a prototype language. Should we care about *prototype* languages in the context of suckless? > Mayby it's multi-paradigm aproach is the problem but what alternatives > to python do you see? How is that a flaw? Dogmatism is a disease. It's one of the reasons why Java sucks, and C makes me write more boilerplate. > awk? Do you really want to use awk for things that aren't its specialty? It's a great language in its own right, not a general-purpose language, in spite of its Turing completeness. > And at last what do you thing about Ruby which is quite similar to the > python in many aspects? Ruby has more powerful lambdas (“blocks” as they call them), has more shorthand (not that I consider that that great actually), etc. Anyhow, do you care about the implementation or the language itself? Regards, Alex Pilon
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