For some reason there’s an unusually high level on conflict in the blogs I read these days. A couple of chicks, neither of whom is actually named “Moxie” are duking it out for exclusive rights to the handle; Kim du Toit and Sarge Stryker are up to their eyeballs in rage over drug testing; Brian Carnell is spanking Dave Winer over the latter’s claim of being an “intellectual” (clue to Dave: intellectuals don’t just listen to NPR, they read books); and over at Reiter’s, we have a contest between Fleishman and Jeffrey Belk pitting CDMA against WiFi for the title of wide area broadband champion, even though neither contender is both “wide area” and “broadband” at the moment.
The wireless tiff is the only one that’s especially interesting, in my book, but I’d be happy to go a few rounds on Python vs. Java if anybody’s interested, and I’ll take either side.
Python sucks. Use perl 😉
Christ. I thought this would be one place I wouldn’t have to hear about the dumb-girl slapfight over nicknames. Sheesh.
Right, Scott, the Moxiepox is everywhere, and you can run but you can’t hide.
Perl is great, but what do you use AFTER you learn how to program?
Oooh. That was good. One point for Richard against the Perl hackers…
I guess this is a bad time to tell you I picked up a Perl for Dummies book the other day to hack around with it??? Hey, it comes with a free CD!
Don’t laugh — I’m serious. I’ve never been able to find a S/370 ALC emulator or a REXX interpreter for my DOS box. Not that I looked that hard…I’m sure someone’s got one somewhere.
The nice thing about perl is that its structure is so, um, accomodating, that there are no syntax errors. Of course, you never completely know why it does what it does, but it generally does something.
Now if Linux supported JCL, I’d be on-board.
perl has its place, just like every other language, scripted or not. it may not be on the aging programmer’s list of favorites, but it has use in many places and does the job quite well. it requires little knowledge, and can be whipped out quite fast.
of course, it’s not going to be doing any mathematical modeling of dynamic finite element phenomena (that’s what fortran was for, in case you’re interested), but it’ll script the install of 100 instances of apache across multiple server farms quite nicely, and the script do it will take 45 seconds to write, if needed.