"Helton, Brandon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Please CC Otto in all replies concerning this topic. I want to make
sure
> he
> reads how wrong he is about Perl and its readability and I think Simon
> sums it
> up perfectly here.
Give the braindead no head, Brandon. I've recently come across something
that changed my whole perspective.
I read "REBOL for Dummies".
If you don't remember, REBOL was this sassity little pipsqueak of a
language that some people used to consider unique before it went
commercial and basically dropped off the face of the earth.
In this book, the author continually compares REBOL to perl. "Look how
simple that is. You couldn't do that in less than 20 lines of Perl",
bitching about how ugly Perl is (then turns around and gives unreadable
REBOL that any management personnel with any responsibility would fire a
programmer for). And on and on it goes ad nauseam. Litterally... ad
nauseam. I can only read a page or two before I get ill.
Yes, REBOL had a couple of neat features. Not that I'd actually call it a
language, though. It's potential range of effectiveness seems less than a
one-purpose language like PHP.
It was reading this book that I suddenly realized that these morons don't
actually think this way. They simply don't have anything better to say.
It's almost like they jump on the "perl is unreadable" bandwagon for no
better reason than that there's other morons there to get drunk with and
roll in the hay.
Speaking of sluts, I now have a new view of Python advocates who use this
to slander Perl. Python is a decent language, granted, though it's to Perl
what Java is to C... an oververbose oversimplification that tries to
please everyone and in so doing becomes suitable for nothing in
particular. Python in recent months has become the total slut of the
scripting world. These are the biggest group of "Perl is hard to read"ers
I've seen. Then they turn around and rip off PCRE (uh, __PERL__ compatible
regular expressions) to give the language any umph at all, and name their
UNTYPED variables with typenames sString nInt fFloat and the rest of the
crazy Microsoft-style hungarian nonsense. The simple fact of the matter is
that they have no comparison to Perl, and can't think of anything original
to say.
I'll trade $@%& for m_g_sz_somestring anyday. And normal indexing and
slicing, and being able to run a program from the command line, and being
able to write a program in less time, and not having to objectify
everything I ever do, and not having silly exceptions upchucked in my face
every time a language designer didn't have the brains to give good
defaults for an action, and having no arbitrary limits, and not having to
convert a "1" into a 1 before I add a 2 to it (BRAINDEAD).
Python has its place, and I do support it and its growingly cocky users
(not that they have much to be cocky about since they're the largest group
of lamers this side of VB) and frankly it needs to stay there. Same thing
for Java, REBOL, PHP (the nerve of that upstart perl module!) and
ColdFusion.
I've been saying for two years, almost three now, that we need to get our
advocacy up to speed. The momentum of Python a year ago was absolutely
amazing, though now it seems to have leveled off. Ruby is coming into its
own now, but I won't throttle Ruby because I haven't heard them speak out
of bounds yet... plus, with just a couple of annoyances, I sorta like it.
Before we get our own advocacy up to speed, we really need something to
say other than "We're going commercial" and "We might have a new
community-oriented version sometime in 2024". (We also need someone to
manage the Advocacy mailing list who will stomp these twerps rather than
encourage them.) We really need to give people back their clue, that Perl
is the most widely used scripting language on the planet and it's there
for more than just a few reasons. Perl is the scripting languages that
others most often attack. Why? Not because it's bad, but because it's
their main competition... though most of them copy us nowadays. (Uh, PCRE
stands for WHAT exactly?) Ruby has some novelties. Python is same-old
same-old everything done that's already been done and let's pretend we
thunk it up even though we can't figure out how to do it right.
(That made perfect sense. It's a rant after all.)
Do we HAVE a list manager on this list? Can we send this twerp a clear
message, for once? I think it's quite time to STOP removing people trying
to clean up the messes we're in and start DROPKICKING the morons actually
causing problems.
p
