Hacker News Reader

Comment by hahainternet | Hacker News Reader

I am in Manchester. I write new Perl code. Python is Perl with a little nicer syntax and a shitload of baggage from overly opinionated people. Ruby is Perl with a little nicer syntax and no other advantages.

I have found no compelling reason to switch, and lots of annoyances that don't seem to exist in Perl.

View on HN

Following this logic, every language is Perl with a bit of this or that. Perl was one of the first of the kind, but people saw obvious problems with it and so they innovated with 'little nicer syntax' or 'little better object system'. You might not want any of this, but you can't deny most people are happier with Python or Ruby.

This is true for all language that do things right the first time.

If you learn C well, everything else(C based languages) look the very same.

Perl enjoys that first movers advantage.

There was a talk by Guido Van Rossum effectively saying that Perl, Python and Ruby are the same language.

You're not wrong, but I wrote that from my perspective, as someone who primarily writes Perl and needs a compelling reason to switch. Obviously someone who was writing code pre-Perl will probably see things a different way.

I'd say it's more like Perl is every language with a bit of this or that. A sufficiently "skilled" Perl hacker can write everything from bad C, to bad Lisp, to bad Fortran, in Perl -- and most certainly can write plenty of bad Perl in Perl, too. It's writing good Perl that's hard.

I'm actually a big fan of Perl, but your characterization of Ruby is wrong. Ruby is Perl with object-orientation first, nicer syntax is a minor detail after that.

If Ruby has nice syntax then Smalltalk should be the syntax of the Gods ;)

Remember we are comparing to Perl ;)

The language of the Gods is clearly Lisp. Unfortunately it's such a pain to work in that most of the time the Gods just use Perl anyway. Oblig. XKCD: http://xkcd.com/224/

Ruby also now has a VM, which people may or may not find more useful. I for one prefer Ruby 1.9.x to 1.8.x.

It's the only major detail to me, because I can do the majority of what I would use in Ruby, in Perl. Nicer syntax is something I can't do though.

See the CPAN module Moops.

I'm thinking more of things like the p6 arrow. Moops is part of the first part, things I can already do in Perl that are in Ruby.

If you can constrain yourself a reasonable OO system in Perl why can't you constrain yourself to a nice subset of the syntax?

I can, I can deal with overly verbose maps or shifting variables off @_ but Ruby provides some similar features to Perl 6 right now. That is an advantage on its part. It's just not compelling enough to make me switch as Perl can do most of the rest just fine.

Having written some Python I agree. Having written a lot of Ruby I disagree.

Can you elaborate on Python's baggage? I'm simply curious.

I wouldn't characterise myself as any sort of expert so really I'm just talking about minor things like ternary operators, ugliness with super, scoping, the annoyance of PEP8 being overly specific etc. Just decisions taken for the sake of 'correctness' that end up being annoying.

Python isn't so bad, decorators and importing is all very swanky. I find that in general though things tend to be less elegant than intended but the delusion of perfection is maintained. I oppose Python's core philosophy and having used a bunch of Django, that also soured me a bit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com