[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Perl for scripting (Re: Plans for 1.12)

[Lalo Martins <lalo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jun 27, 2000 at 10:52:28PM +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 27, 2000 at 03:37:26PM -0300, Lalo Martins wrote:
> > Or putting it the other way around: some people just won't
> > learn Perl, some just won't learn Scheme.
> > 
> > Either we support both perl and scheme, or we use a language
> > with a very high "DOH factor" like TCL, Python or Pike.
> > 
> > (DOH factor: the percentage of times you will find out that you
> > can do something exactly like you thought you could. Scheme has
> > a low initial DOH factor because you can't "2 + 2", for example.)

Addendum: or something you read will mean exactly what you
think it does - this is really the low point of Perl :-)


> Me thinks python is veeeeeeeeery low DOHish if you ever programmed C
> (no +=, whitespace problem, print auto-\n, one-element array problem etc.)

All of these are a lot more DOHish in Python than C for anyone
who never did C. ("Uh? What do you mean by +=?")

BTW... what one-element array problem?

And WRT print: a C-head won't use print anyway...
and sys.stdout.write() doesn't auto-\n


> On the other hand perl has gigantic DOH-factor, because
> it is most TIMTOWTDI and most DWIM language.

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh?


> And hardly anyone knows Pike or TCL.

Agreed. But there was once a time when more people knew TCL
than any of Perl and Python and Scheme.


In the end, "easy to learn" is what's similar to what you
already know. This is what makes this kind of decision
complicated. Perhaps we should use the rejection factor - what
languages you would _never_ use given choice? :-)

[]s,
                                               |alo
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