Perl or Python?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Jul 05, 2009 at 03:16:32PM -0700, Rajinder Yadav wrote:
> 
> --- On Sun, 7/5/09, Marc Lanctot <lanctot-yfeSBMgouQgsA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 
> > From: Marc Lanctot <lanctot-yfeSBMgouQgsA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org>
> > Subject: Re: [TLUG]: Perl or Python?
> > To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
> > Received: Sunday, July 5, 2009, 4:34 PM
> > On Thu, 2 Jul 2009 14:35:47 -0400
> > lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
> > (Lennart Sorensen) wrote:
> > 
> > > On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 04:57:53PM -0400, Marc Lanctot
> > wrote:
> > > > Python is still a high-level scripting language,
> > but higher than
> > > > Perl is. Python is more like Java, really. It is
> > a full-fledged
> > > > language in the sense that it comes with a
> > standard library,
> > > > enforces stronger syntax requirements, etc. etc..
> > 
> > > 
> > > That's a mean thing to say about python.  Unlike
> > java, python is
> > > actually useful and doesn't make you go insane trying
> > to run it on
> > > other systems, and python has decent performance.
> > > 
> > 
> > You're going to have to do a fair bit of convincing to get
> > anyone to
> > believe you that "Java is not useful". Specifically, oh,
> > say 20% (the
> > highest proportion) of the programmers out there [1]. 
> > 
> > It's very hard to make a general comparison on performance
> > between these
> > two languages; it depends on the specific task at hand,
> > the
> > JVM/Python interpreter implementation, and the specific
> > system.
> > There's wayyyy too much variance. If you could point to
> > scientific
> > evidence, I would be inclined to look into it. I doubt
> > anybody would
> > ever spend effort on that, though, because /that/ is
> > useless -- if
> > anybody ever has to make the Python vs. Java decision, it
> > will depend
> > highly on what they're using the language for. 
> > 
> > [1] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
> > 
> > Marc
> > 
> > -- 
> 
> And I thought there was only bad blood between C++ and Java developers ;)

I just hate java.

The runtime has changes so many times, and is frequently not backwards
compatible.  Very annoying to try and install some java stuff for
developers just to eventually find out that the library you need only
works with java 1.4, and you have 1.3, and there is nothing in the
library or documentation that tells you this.  Java developers hardly
ever even consider this.  They just use whatever version they have,
and assume everyone else has that too.

You should not need a class to store your main function.  Programs require
some control logic.  It should not all be objects.  Something has to
manage your objects.  What a stupid design.

Anytime you hit a website that is stupidly slow, you can be sure the
pages end in .jsp or something simular.  Of course each page will jump
through 10 other pages on the way to where you are going, taking multiple
seconds per page.

So overall, the only impression one can get is that java is either a very
crappy language, or it attracts incredibly bad programmers, or maybe it
just makes people incredibly bad programmers.

OO can be a good tool.  Making it the only tool in a language can never
go well, in in the case of java it certainly didn't go well.

The write once run everywhere, well that hasn't happened yet.  So since
that doesn't work, please give us high performance native code instead,
rather than a stupid virtual machine that often doesn't let you reuse
code anyhow.  It was a huge marketing push by sun and lots of managers
jumped on it, and it never delivered, and now we are stuck with all these
java programmers tying together hundreds of bloated java classes into
huge bloated slow applications.

I am not saying use python, or c or anything else.  I am just saying
java isn't a solution.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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