1 post tagged “python”

Recently with all the renewed effort on the part of Perl programmers to be better public advocates of our language, I've noticed an uptick in counter productive and quick frankly hateful comments directed at Perl.

I'd really like to find out why.  I'd also like to be reasonable and think there's actually something rational behind all this.  Several ideas come to mind.  For example, is all this negativity based on Perl's perception as spagetti code?  Is that just rumor or have many of you out there been required to step in and take over projects with difficult codebases?  Is it due to the fact that Perl 6 is still in development?  Has it to do with something many of you have experienced on the job?  Or maybe you've tried to get help from various Perl communities and gotten flamed?

I really have trouble understanding where this is coming from.  Personally, I use Perl because I find it works with my brain and not against it.  I've not found this to be the case with PHP, Python or Ruby.  I have nothing against any of those languages, but it makes little sense for me to force myself to relearn and rebuild my current skillset in a different language that doesn't really offer me a compelling reason to do so.  I'm deeply invested into the Perl community as a contributer to several important open source projects and that's what I enjoy about my job.

However the negativity is something I'd like to address if possible, because all this hate directed at Perl can affect me personally in terms of future employment and job options.  This directly affects my family, my wife, son and dog, so I take it very seriously. 

Because to be quite honest, the combined popularity of the most common scripting languages doesn't come close to countering the Java/C# juggernaut, and as someone committed to open source / free software this is an additional worry for me.  Neither of those languages are particularly committed to software freedom.  As far as I am concerned Sun (or Oracle now I guess) and Microsoft give some lip service to software freedom since that's a popular thing nowadays, but it's minimal and tactical in nature.  Free free to argue with me if you think I'm wrong, but I just don't see a deep and fundamental commitment.  Now, maybe you don't care about software freedom, but I'm old enough to remember the days when being a programmer nearly always involved proprietary tool chains and expensive certifications.  If it wasn't for the threat posed by developers and advocates of free software there would be no Java Community Process, no Mono, nor would there likely be quality free version of IDEs like NetBeans, Eclipse or the various free 'Express' versions from Microsoft.  There would be no free, online versions of documentation.  So it really seems to be we should be working together, not against each other. 

Several possible points of collaboration that suggest themselves would be standards for testing, deployment and management of applications.  Also, we often depend on a core set of external libraries, such as MemcacheD, xml and xslt parsing libraries and so forth.  It would be great if we worked together to improve these and to ensure that the language bindings were of consistent and high quality.

Each of our communities has different strengths and weaknesses.  The Rails group are great at advocacy and Ruby has a reputation for delivering nice, clean code.  Python really focuses well on education and ramping up newcomers.  Perl has great testing and deployment tools, as well as CPAN.  Why are sniping each other when working together would have so many benefits?