Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wazoox 1379 days ago
> But that's precisely the point: Python 2.5 realized that something was fundamentally broken and the community went through a painful transition process.

It's still not done for many, many projects. "python2" is still installed on 99% of systems I touch. Off the top of my head, the only machine missing it is my laptop, actually.

So your last perl codebase had the choice of not going through this painful transition process. Maybe it's what makes the best sense from a business point-of-view? "Worse is Better", remember, that's why we're running this sloppy Linux everywhere and not the almost-perfect OpenVMS or Genera.

>But without the interpreter helping you out on that front, it'll produce ugly code, and take mental discipline and disciplined code reviewing practices on a team.

"Ugly code" is in the eye of the beholder. For many a python project I'll have to add long series of elif or try/catch to check for the type of some incoming data returned from some API, where it could have been easily managed through duck typing in python 2.7 or Perl. Most programmers won't catch it until the error occurs in production, if the value returned switches types infrequently enough.

> The point that the article is trying to refute, namely that Perl is for dinosaurs, in my mind just absolutely stands.

Try C someday :)