I am trying to understand why Edwards post generated such a negative response. I am neither agreeing or disagreeing with his statement - because I don't think he is making one. He posted a data point, and asked others to post the samething. About the only thing he could say, is that for his coding style, Python appears to be more terse. He went out of his way to describe mitigating factors and didn't draw any general conclusions.
It seems to me the discussion could actually be beneficial. If several different coders gave similar responses, ie code line/character count comparisons, we might be able to see if there is a trend of any sort - the more "anecdotes" given and we start to have trends - or maybe we don't. The UFO comparison is silly, UFO sightings being based on time and space coordinates are inherently unreviewable. Ed's code and his analysis methods can be repeated (didn't say they were repeated, just they can be). Perhaps some ppl who switched from python to perl could do something similar, reversing the skill bias Edward admitted too? If we wanted to pursue more study of the phenomenon we could choose some stylistic rules about perl and python for test code, etc to help normalize the data. Lastly, Ed - can you post the code? That may be putting your head in the lion's mouth so to speak and make the whole thread even worse - and your coding style will get shredded by perl advocates... ok nevermind don't post it.' Ok I'm going to end with a flamebait - but I would posit, ALL OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL - that a smaller number of characters and lines in code is more maintainable than larger number of characters and lines in the code. <duck> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
