use Perl

• Second order effects of language syntax (Score:2)

  by ziggy (25)

  When I was working in the Great White North, I was working with a few Perl programmers that were thrown onto a Python+Zope project for the oddest of reasons. They were smart. They picked up Python without any difficulty. They learned how Zope wanted them to write and structure web apps, eventually.
  
  After a few months on the project, they had some interesting insights into the different world views of Perl and Python. A moderately experienced Perl programmer can skim over a random piece of Perl code and i
  • Re:Second order effects of language syntax (Score:1)

    by chromatic (983) on 2007.09.10 17:21 (#57695) Homepage Journal

    Great thoughts, as usual Ziggy.

    Therefore, any Python programmer of even the most basic skill level should be able to read any Python program (if not completely understand the underlying algorithm and data structures).

    Without being able to understand the program's design in the large or small, is being able to read the program even interesting? I can't think of a case where it is. Am I missing something?

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    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ziggy (25)

      Without being able to understand the program's design in the large or small, is being able to read the program even interesting?

      I think you're approaching the problem from the wrong direction.
      
      Given a new program and no previous understanding of how it works, you could read the program and build an understanding from there. Consider the first time you approached a full set of basic binary tree primitives, or a bubble sort. It may have been the first time you came across these concepts, but if you could r