Thank you Ed for your eloquent statement. From now on I will avoid humor in posts on this thread , my previous attempts were not useful or productive - and I think there is something interesting in this discussion.
It might be interesting to come up with a coding assignment for developers to attempt in both perl and python. Ask the developers to submit such items as length of time coding in each language, which they think is their "stronger" language, age, level of formal education in computer science and related, number of years programming all together, country of origni, Operating System perference, etc. Then perform analysis on the code an attempt to normalize for the above factors. In addtion to line/char counts we could look at execution time, memory consumption, number of detected bugs. Of course this means getting a bunch of developers interested in the task - and the words of Andrew Tannenbaum come to mind. But it would still be interesting - perhaps nothing could be proven - but that in itself might be useful. Physical beauty in humans is an area where some quantitifiable analysis can be performed (referring to a strong correlation between symmetry and percieved beauty). Beauty in poetry - to the best of my knowledge - has never been shown itself to be subject to quantitative analysis. Sometimes knowing what doesn't work - and proving it doesn't work - can be very useful. Don't believe me? Thgis is a bad example, but look at hidden variables theorems in quantum physics. Back the 40's Turing provided (a flawed) proof that no hidden variables theory could explain the quantum effects witnessed. Hence no viable hidden variable theories were even posited and this area of research nearly died out. It has had a slight resurgance, after Turing's proof was found to relate to specific subset of hidden variable theorems, rather than a truly generic proof. But I think it illustrates the value of proving a negative. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
