Re: Programming Languages, "to C or not to C, that is the Q."

[Peter.Robinson@t-online.de (Peter Robinson)]

On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 21:30, Steve Lamb wrote:
> Peter Robinson wrote:
> > I was meaning not to chime in on this discussion, but I think people are
> > missing the point. You can write clear or befuddled code in any language
> > you choose, and saying perl is harder to understand is kind of like
> > saying Chinese is harder to understand than English if that happens to
> > be your native language.
> 
>      This is disingenious to say the least.  Are you trying to say that 
> brainfuck is just as clear as, say, Perl?  For some examples:
> http://esoteric.sange.fi/brainfuck/bf-golf-results/results0.txt
> 
>      Extreme cases, to be sure, and yet Perl has such a lovely thing as this
> ${$foo} which is far simpler in Python (being just foo).  Just as brainfuck 
> is, as it's name implies, a brain fuck so too is Perl harder to read than 
> Python.  That isn't a matter of subjectiveness.  It can be argued on a 
> quantifiable level.

You are picking an example that is unlikely to be seen in many programs
and which is not typical of most programs that I have written or seen.
You may have forgotten the learning stage which I am sure you went
through when you first saw Python. I do not know Python, but I recently
tried to decipher a few scripts in Python and was not able to grasp
quite a few things. There are apparently many elements not common to
other languages (don't you have to follow a certain standard indentation
for instance?). I wound up googling a bit more until I found the same
thing in C -- which I understood without problems because I am familiar
with C. What does that prove? -peter


-- 
Peter N. Robinson
peter.robinson@t-online.de
peter.robinson@charite.de
http://www.charite.de/ch/medgen/robinson/