On Mon, Oct 06, 2003 at 03:14:24PM -0500, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> John Belmonte dijo [Sun, Oct 05, 2003 at 10:20:59AM -0400]:
> > Lua is a modern high-level language. Its 15K stand-alone interpreter
> > depends on only two libraries which total less than 200K. The
> > functionality of its standard libraries are limited by ANSI C, but there
> > are are third party libraries for talking to the OS, such as a POSIX
> > library.
> >
> > Someone less averse to prefix notation than I might make the same
> > argument about scsh. It's larger and has more dependencies, but on the
> > other hand has full library support for system programming.
> >
> > Why not consider tiny languages?
>
> Because of how powerful is Perl? Because of the amount of things that
> depend on Perl that currently exist and would be a waste of time to
> rewrite? Because Perl might be the best tool for many cases? There are
> many possible answers...
Actually, TTBOMK, it's more or less a historic choice. Which is to say,
at the time the decision was made, Perl was one of the only tools which
COULD do all of the things needed for setting up a base system, in a single
language which could (reasonably) easily express this (bash shell does not
easily express it, even if it *can* express it, generally).
If the decision were being made today, we might see arguments over Perl,
Lua, Python, and probably others - valid ones, in fact. However, now isn't
then, and once the decision has been made, it becomes a much harder thing
to move away from it (for good reason) - since it involves rewriting
everything, with the attendant bugs, problems, unrest, and insanity that
comes with.
(I like Perl; it's my slap-it-together language of choice. Conversely, I
also regularly work on a system where core pieces are written in python,
because that's the religion of the person who set it up. If you want to see
my actual opinion, go read the 'Perl vs Python' bit in Unix Power Tools,
3rd edition - written by the same person, and reviewed in-house to ensure a
fair hearing to Perl :)
Actually, I'd almost prefer Python for doing Debian base work - not because
Perl is bad at it, per se, but because so many people have bad Perl habits,
and this propagates into the scripts. Python makes it (slightly) harder
to write truly gross code, and since Debian maintainer scripts really
shouldn't be doing the stupid tricks that prevents you from doing *anyway*,
I'd be willing to take that loss. But it just isn't worth it to try to
convert everything (at least, not until Perl 6 forces us to consider
rewriting it all, anyway...)
Though getting Python to have an easier Build-Depend chain would be nice
for porters, if we ever do support it as an option for maintainer scripts.
--
Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
Debian GNU NetBSD/i386 porter : :' :
`. `'
`-
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