Wed, 22 Nov 2006
Perl programmers are from Mars, Python programmers are from Venus
Here's my dirty little secret: I read PlanetPerl.
I do so for a couple of reasons. First, there are a number of good programmers that post through it. Second, I'm easily amused by any discussion of Perl 6. And third, occasionally my mind gets boggled.
Take, for example, Ovid's post on the MIT switch to Python. The primary post itself is silly enough -- Guido doesn't like lambda, so Guido has serious limitations in his thought process, so Python is a lousy language -- but some of the comments are even worse, IMO. The comments boil down to "programming is hard, so we should make programs hard to read". I herewith retaliate:
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first
place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible,
you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
--Brian W. Kernighan
I wholeheartedly agree with the SICP statement that "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." I don't really see any irony in SICP containing this statement, either; programmers should know basic math and lambda calculus, I think, but that's different from making your programs hard to understand.
In fact, my personal programming motto has become "strive for simplicity", because simple code is both easy to read and easy to test, and therefore has a higher probability of being both correct and maintainable. Your mileage will not vary.
--titus
posted at: 10:25 | path: /nov-06 | 8 comments
Comments:
Posted by Reg Braithwaite at Wed Nov 22 12:22:16 2006:
Thanks for the link love! I'm looking forward to reading more dispatches from the Ivory Basement...
Posted by Sean McGrath at Wed Nov 22 13:09:28 2006:
That Kernighan quote is a gem! I hadn't come across it before.
Sean
Posted by wow at Wed Nov 22 14:36:43 2006:
"Here's my dirty little secret: I read PlanetPerl."
This is one pure instant of time where the acronym LOL took all its glory. I really laughed out loud. You said this like a "coming out", like there's some deep secrets stuffed in the reason you read planet perl. The secret of Brokeback Python.
Posted by Titus Brown at Wed Nov 22 15:56:43 2006:
I'm not sure reading PlanetPerl is acceptable behavior for a Python dogmatist ;)
Posted by Jules at Fri Nov 24 10:35:36 2006:
And therefore, we shouldn't make it harder by not using lambda (which is used A LOT in SICP).
Posted by Ian Bicking at Fri Nov 24 22:28:05 2006:
"And therefore, we shouldn't make it harder by not using lambda (which is used A LOT in SICP)."
Maybe the MIT guys were tired of people confusing functional programming with the term "lambda"? Ovid's original comment shows quite a bit of confusion towards what they were getting at in SICP -- which is something you construct with "lambda" in Scheme and "def" in Python.
Though in the same way some Pythonistas can be just as confused about the lack of first class functions in Ruby -- since really the important thing is the ability to pass around code, which Ruby can do just fine even if it is awkward to pass "functions"... the same issue with confusing syntax with semantics.
Posted by Ovid at Mon Dec 18 17:08:16 2006:
I will freely confess that I am neither an expert in Python or the lambda calculus, so if someone can provide concrete examples of why Python's lambda function is not broken, I'd welcome that.
Posted by Ovid at Mon Dec 18 17:16:25 2006:
What I forgot to mention is that there are other reasons why I disagree with some of Guido's approaches, but it would take me too long to describe here. Suffice it to say that on use.perl I was "preaching to the choir", but I keep forgetting that there are many outside the "choir" who read use.perl, so I really need to be more descriptive in what I say.
That being said, I think Guido is brilliant and I really like what he's done with Python and my quibbles are minor. It's a "six of one, half dozen of the other" situation for many issues.