algebaric operations on a RegEx?

[Madison Kelly]

William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 03:55:37PM -0400, Madison Kelly wrote:
>> First and foremost, I don't want to be seen trying to talk you into a  
>> language you are unhappy with. Different languages for different  
>> folks... To answer your questions though...
> 
> While I agree with this in general, sometimes I wish that there were
> fewer ... because then we'd have much greater opportunity for
> collaboration and code reuse.  Of course, we wouldn't have as many great
> languages if we didn't have the chance to go down other paths far enough
> to see where they lead.

The whole concept of an ecosystem in open source software extends to the 
languages it is written in, too. Over time, as languages are explored as 
you suggest, they will either fit a niche or die off. Both Perl and 
Python, heck PHP also, thrive because they fit a niche. More than that, 
they fit the personalities of people who use them to get stuff done. For 
that reason alone they all, in my mind, are equally good.

>> Python is a great language, but not flexible enough for me. See top of  
>> this message.
> 
> The dogma of Python is that there is a "right way to do it", rather than
> "there's more than one way to do it", but practically, there are a lot
> of ways to do things in Python.  The difference seems to be that the
> Python community encourages coders to converge on a collectively
> determined Pythonic style, whereas the Perl community embraces diversity
> in style, approach and syntax.  Embraces, hugs fervently and gives wet
> sloppy kisses, actually.  This difference may be why the Perl community
> is a more vibrant one.

It's like going to school. Some people thrive in a structured 
environment and some people thrive in a more... complicated environment. 
Take someone from one group and try to push them to work in the other 
will cripple their ability to produce, make them miserable and generally 
suck all around.

It's why I *hate* when I see people try to push Linux on other people 
who obviously are not interested. I know how much I hate working on 
Microsoft, I know how frustrated I get with PHP/MySQL and I know that 
when I am forced to use them I bitch and complain. I don't want someone 
uncomfortable with my favourites Perl/PostgreSQL/Linux forced to use 
them because then they too will bitch and complain and generally be 
miserable.

Linux, like programming languages, share the same strength and weakness 
- choice.

My $0.02 (+ interest) :)

Madi
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists