new sysinstall

[David Leimbach]

On Sep 1, 2003, at 6:33 PM, Richard Coleman wrote:

Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai wrote:

I've done too little Python yet to comment on that, but one of my
personal pet peeves with it was the forcing of whitespace to be
essential to the flow of the code.  (*awaits rabid Python lovers to
attack him now*)  From what I know Python can do nice things as easily
as Ruby can, for example.
I'm not a Python fanatic by any stretch of the imagination.  But I 
will comment that the "whitespace is syntax" bother me for about the 
first 20 lines of code.  After that, you quickly get past it, and 
don't think about it much again.

 I actually found the forced whitespace refreshing ... as I knew that 
my coworkers would
actually indent in some fashion :) [well it wasn't that bad but it was 
easier when
we had no choice to indent or not to read code written by many 
people.... Maybe
we should switch to Ada95 :) BWAHAHAHAHAHA... ahem]

I have found this to be generally true for most syntactic elements. 
It's generally the semantic details which determine (in the long run) 
whether you will like or dislike a particular language.

Actually I decide if I like a language by whether or not I can easily 
express solutions in
it.  As a result I like Python for some tasks... sed and awk for other 
problems, and I just
started learning Functional Programming with Haskell :).

Just cuz you found a nice hammer don't mean the whole world is a nail 
:).


Richard Coleman
richardcoleman at xxxxxxxxxxxxxx