Re: [MLUG] guess what

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 1 Apr 2004, Michael wrote:

> >Interesting.  I think of Perl, C++ and Java as having very
> >different roles in computing.  Where does Python fit in?  Would
> >it be more likely to do what Perl has been doing for people?
> 
> Python, I think, most directly competes with Java.

Baloney.  Java seems to be the new industry standard for whatever it 
is your boss wants to do.  Python isn't.

> C/C++ are still generally going to be faster for low level stuff
> but Python is very easy to wrap around C code. 

Interestingly, almost everything is these days.  Check out:

http://www.swig.org/

Especially check out the screenshots page.  SWIG is the bomb.  They
used to have a testimonials page where I was anonymously quoted:

   "I came.  I wrapped.  It ran.  Woo Hoo!"

I guess they decided that this was not presenting the kind of 
professional face they wanted to put forward.

> A lot of large projects written in Perl should be rewritten in
> Python but those things should never have been written in Perl to
> begin with. Perl just isn't well suited to large complex projects.

Michael, if you don't know what you're talking about, just go back
to playing with your two notebooks.  Yes, there is some sucky Perl
code out there, but if you think that the *sucky programmers* who
wrote it would have written it so much better in Python, I think
you're high.  The amount of crappy code written in a language is
usually a function of the number of monkeys who are typing and how
easy or hard it is to get anything to run.  Popular languages with a
relativly low threshold for entry (and Perl qualifies here,
interestingly) are by nature going to have more junky code written 
in them.  There's also a lot of bad C code out there, but C has a 
high enough barrier to entry so I'm guessing that there is less 
dorky stuff out there.

> It is, of course, possible to embed Perl inside Python in order to
> get the best of both worlds if needed.

The opposite is also supported by Perl modules.

jking


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