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Re: Is perl still the No.1 language for sysadmin?



David Christensen wrote:

> Look at the use of parentheses in Lisp [...]

I have thought about that - is Lisp possible without them?
But how do you then know priority? I'm sure someone tried to
get rid of them, but how?

> the use of white space as syntax in Python

AKA "significant whitespace" in CS lingo :)

> In contrast, postmodernism allows for cultural and personal
> context in the interpretation of any work of art. How you
> dress is your business. It's the origin of the Perl slogan:
> "There's More Than One Way To Do It!"

While I agree with that slogan - it's obvious, we see it every
day, everywhere - zsh has the shell like iteration loop, but
also the for loop, Elisp has CL-like functions (implemented in
Elisp), and isn't CL the programmable programming language,
even? So cred to Perl for the slogan but "There Are More Than
Perl that" ... uhm, whatever. And what about LaTeX? A zillion
ways to output the same document, basically.

> The reason Perl gives you more than one way to do anything
> is this: I truly believe computer programmers want to be
> creative, and they may have many different reasons for
> wanting to write code a particular way. What you choose to
> optimize for is your concern, not mine. I just supply the
> paint—you paint the picture.

I agree but I think maybe the success of Python, and its
development speed, is actually because of some of that
rigidness, yes, including the whitespace lack of freedom.

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal


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