Sorry, data about reports about X *is* data about X unless you believe the reports are uninfluenced by X. Like any proxy measure, it introduces noise and uncertainty, but it is still data.
I can't imagine a motivation for Edward to make this up, so I accept his anecdotes as data. While it is possible to imagine developing a lab experiment to compare the terseness of Python and Perl, it is unlikely that funding is or should be available for the effort. This doesn't make it an uninteresting question. Is the widely held belief that real-world Perl is terser than real-world Python true? So far we have only the two reports from Edward. Still anyone programming in the dynamic languages world would acknowledge that they are quite striking and provocative. I don't see the purpose of this controversy, but it reminds me of some rather cynical attacks on climate science, and I don't like it at all. We don't always have the luxury of vast data of impeccable quality, but we still need to make judgements about the world. mt -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
