Simon Willison’s Weblog

Code personalities

Danny O’Brien compares Perl with Python. Best observation: Python code just doesn’t have much personality compared to Perl.

Posted 10th August 2003 at 10:28 pm

This is Code personalities by Simon Willison, posted on 10th August 2003.

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Speaking as somebody who's been writing perl code solidly for a living for nearly 3 years (and about 5 years adhoc before that) I can only consider that to be a Good Thing.

A lot of the messes I've come across in my own and others code would have been easily avoidable in Python.

-Dom

Dominic Mitchell - 11th August 2003 08:32 - #
Speaking as somebody who used to program in FORTRAN and perl and now programs in Python I think thats a bad thing. If there are 15 different ways to solve a problem, thats 15 ways I have to know if I'm to recognise it in someone elses code. If theres a single way then I'll spot it straight away without having to take the code line by line. Speaking as someone who had to rewrite his own code a year later at sportinglife.com and not being able to understand what I'd done, I would have been happier with twice as much Python code that would have taken a quarter a long to understand.
Tim Parkin - 11th August 2003 13:41 - #

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Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/08/10/personalities