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Comment by garret | Hacker News Reader

the essential complexity of the code ... will manifest elsewhere

By using a different language or by writing simpler code, you can avoid every complexity mentioned, so it's not really essential complexity. And programmers in any language can create these problems, except "the intrinsic Python OO worldview," and maybe "weird library APIs". So this sounds like it's really just a criticism of Python.

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I'm glad you brought this up, I had forgetten that part of the interview. Damien's argument about complexity of data is bizarre given that, due to perls inability to do any nested structures without using perl-refs, complex data in perl is much more effort than in say, python.

...complex data in perl is much more effort than in say, python.

Accessing the first element of the first element of a nested array in Perl 5:

  $aoa[0][0]

Accessing the first element of the first element of a nested list in Python:

   lol[0][0]

Perl 5 references do sometimes produce uglier syntax, but your quibble here is over a sigil.

Nested array, fine. Now try that with a hash of arrays of objects with an array member, the 3rd element.

Python:

hash['foo'][3].children[2]

But it's instructive that you assume I'm talking about something as trivial as an array of arrays.

Perl 5:

  $hash{foo}[3]{children}[2]

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