Random Perl ... rant

[Ovid]

--- Andy Wardley <abw at wardley.org> wrote:

> Ovid wrote:
>  > 2.  Python is arguably a nicer language than Perl for many tasks
> and if
>  > people can get over their silly qualms about vertical whitespace,

Er, that should have read "horizontal" whitespace.

> The other 10% of my dislike comes from the fact that it makes
> auto-generation
> of code (say, to translate a template to native Python code) a real
> pain in the compiler.

Ooh, good point!  I do a lot of that and it never crossed my mind about
Python.

> "There are many great things about PHP, but the language isn't one of
> them."
> (can't remember where I read that, but kudos to whoever wrote it)

Great quote.

To expand on PHP:  if you think it's a better language than Perl, not
much can be said.  If you think it's a worse language than Perl, the
fact remains that most programmers couldn't say why.  At the end of the
day they just want to get their job done and PHP makes it easy
(particularly since the vast majority of code I've seen *anywhere* is
so badly written that writing it in PHP would make no significant
difference).

Cheers,
Ovid

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