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

[Rick Taylor <ricktaylor@speakeasy.net>]

Then you guys are agreed on ruby?

On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 22:26 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> 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/
> 
> 
-- 
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