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Comment by bakuninsbart | Hacker News Reader

Was that sarcasm or genuine preference? Either way I'd love to know what drives your opinion in Python vs. Perl!

Well, not exactly sarcasm but a snarky way to say that Ruby was written by a Japanese programmer, so he can't be completely incompetent.

Perl is my preference of the three (Perl, Python, Ruby). I agree with 'There Is More Than One Way To Do It', and disagree with 'There Is Only One Way To Do It'. And Perl has the best support for regular expressions. Ruby is OK, but I learned Perl first, so it feels more natural.

> And Perl has the best support for regular expressions.

To me this sounds a bit like driving to a supermarket three towns away because it has the best selection of coffee filters... :)

when perl5 released, this actually is a good idea. but world changed.

Well to be honest, I have driven more than an hour to go to my favorite Italian deli and get my favorite sub sandwich, so it fits my personality

Why do you hate Python? And what is your opinion on Nim, Crystal, Rust etc?

I don't know exactly why, but whenever I write something in Python I get extremely irritated. I'm always worried that I'm going to clobber the namespace somehow. Some functions like 'str' are extremely short and common, and happens to be a variable I always use for temporary variables. The forced indentation messes up the code when I want to debug something by commenting out a bunch of lines.

But sometimes there is a builtin module that makes something easier to do, so I am faced with a 'Kobayashi Maru', a no-win situation

I've never used Nim or Crystal. Rust is too complicated for me to bootstrap and not particularly compatible with older architectures as far as I remember (I believe had trouble with compiling 32-bit)

FWIW, Nim has various trade offs for you. It has an alternative comment syntax that goes like

    echo 1 #[ deactivated ]#, 2

While `from modA import nil` does exist, it is not very idiomatic. Idiomatic is more managing the global namespace with the type system/overload resolution which it sounds like you would hate. However, shadowing outer scope names with inner scope names (like your `str` example) *is* considered idiomatic.

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