[m463]

> I took great pride in making readable, maintainable perl.

In the past when I used perl, I did the same thing.

But I came to learn one thing about perl - its good point is its bad point.

When I used it, perl was the highest level language I ever used. It was expressive, meaning I could take an idea in my head, and implement it in perl with the least friction of any language.

When I worked with other people's perl, I found they were mindful and cared about what they were doing.

But the way they thought was sometimes almost alien to me, so the expression of their thinking was a completely different type of perl, and it was lots less readable to me. And frequently the philosophy of what they wrote was backwards or inside out from what I would do.

Now I have replaced perl with python day to day and although implementation of code seems a few steps removed from my thinking, it seems that other people's code is more easily read and understood. (this is just my opinion)

[gilleain]

As they say, with perl there's more than one way to do it (TMTOWTDI) and with python there is only one way.

Both approaches have their merits. Like with maven, where I once saw a question on a forum that was like "how do I do X?" and the reply was basically "You can't, don't try to do so, as that's wrong".

[tzs]

There is usually more than one way to do it in Python, too. For example most people's Python fizzbuzz seem pretty different from mine:

  def fizzbuzz(n, *args):
    cur = ['' for x in range(1,n+1)]
    for m, postfix in args:
      cur = [y+postfix if x%m==0 else y for x, y in zip(range(1,n+1), cur)]
    cur = [str(x) if y == '' else y for x, y in zip(range(1,n+1), cur)]
    return cur

  print("\n".join(fizzbuzz(100, (3, 'fizz'), (5, 'buzz'))))

[m463]

  The king wisely had the software developer beheaded,
  and they all lived happily ever after.

:)

[Ferret7446]

In Python, there should be one obvious way to do it. Your way is clearly a joke or an abomination.

[revskill]

You are funny. I love it.

[Shorel]

That's an interesting point that could be even more interesting with some examples on both languages.

[m463]

I don't have any code examples, but I recall:

- a lot of things I did in perl ended up using regular expressions

- in comparison python use of regular expressions is not first-class so many problems would use string functions instead. (although r'<expr>' was less ambiguous wrt quoting rules)

- in perl path manipulation would use regular expressions

- in python I embraced os.path

- I would use oo in python, but rarely in perl

- argparse