On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 05:09:06PM -0400, David Hummel wrote:
> IMHO, readability is less about the language and more about coding
> style.  You can write very readable code in any language.  

You can also write very unreadable code in any language.  Some just
seem to encourage that more than others... that's always been my
gripe with Perl.  I've seen plenty of readable Perl code, but I've
seen far less unreadable Python than Perl.  Perl is a semantically
large language with lots of clever shortcuts, which in my mind really
only lend themselves to encouraging unreadable code.  The size and
inconsistency of the syntax of Perl force a much greater... ah...
let's say learning investment, and complicates maintaining someone
else's code by orders of magnitude.  There *are* many ways to do it,
each one either subtlely or vastly different, and some of which are
just plain bad.  You need to get inside the head of the programmer to
figure out what's going on.  Python, for my money, just doesn't have
that issue, yet remains very powerful and flexible.

> I personally dislike Python's reliance on indentation level

Everyone makes an issue of that.  Honestly, at first I didn't like the
forced indentation, until I had an epiphany: I would never
(intentionally) write code that's not consistently indented.  Doing so
makes the code less readable.  So it immediately became a non-issue
for me.  If you use a modern editor, and configure it well, you don't
even have to think about it.

> and the silly double underscore name mangling for class-private
> members, 

They're a little ugly, but they're sort of meant to be: they are
clearly distinguished from "normal" code objects.  It calls out their
specialness.  Besides, everything to do with OOP in Perl is ugly.

Python also has much better exception handling.

I'd still use Perl for heavy regex parsing (probably), and maybe a
handful of other things, but only in small programs that didn't do
much else.  I'm not going to say that Perl is a bad language, but I
will say that I've never enjoyed programming with it, no matter how
well I've gotten to know it.  Python just works like I do, making it
almost always the best tool for me, almost regardless of the problem
I'm trying to solve.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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