FSF Awards Guido van Rossum For Python

bkuhn writes: "The FSF today bestowed its fourth annual Award for the Advancement of Free Software upon Guido van Rossum . The two other finalists were L. Peter Deutsch and Andrew Tridgell." Developing Python seems like a good reason :)

Comments

Re:Yes, but...

[Zagadka]

It's one thing to program in good style, but it's another to have the language force you to. Yes, I'm still resentful over that.

If you ever have to maintain code written by others, you'll be glad that Python encouraged them to use good style. (I say "encouraged", because no language really forces good or bad style.) It's a well known fact, even among Perl advocates, that the vast majority of Perl code is indecipherable. It isn't impossible to write fairly clean code in Perl, but the language certainly doesn't encourage it.

Re:Yes, but...

[Shiny Metal S.]

It's one thing to program in good style, but it's another to have the language force you to. Yes, I'm still resentful over that.

It's a well known fact, even among Perl advocates, that the vast majority of Perl code is indecipherable. It isn't impossible to write fairly clean code in Perl, but the language certainly doesn't encourage it.

Please, don't argue Perl vs. Python, it will only start pointless flame wars. Let's agree that it's just a matter of taste. Remember, There's More Than One Way To Do It. I personally prefer Perl, but it's a totally subjective opinion. Perl and Python are more or less equally powerful languages today. But what I'm really looking forward to is Parrot, i.e. the virtual machine for Perl 6 and, I hope, also for Python, Ruby, Tcl and maybe few other good languages. It's a VM and a low-level assembly language for that VM - the language, to which Perl 6 (and hopefully other high-level languages) will be compiled to (as a layer between Perl and the VM bytecode) like C is compiled to machine-specific Assembbler (between C and the machine code). See the examples of Parrot use and read Parrot: Some Assembly Required to see what it is. Also the perl6-internals at perl.org mailing list archives is a good place to start. I'd love to see Perl and Python playing nice together, thanks to Parrot. It'd be really cool if I could write a program in Perl with someone who writes his part in Python, and another one writing in Ruby. I would just use their classes and objects, they would just use mine as well, without worrying about the language of our implementation. Parrot can be the answer here. Would it be the end of language flame wars? I do hope so.

Re:Yes, but...

[Trepidity]

The original poster's point still stands though - most Perl code is utter crap and completely unreadable. This is not to say that Perl is inherently worse than Python, and good Perl code is probably comparable to good Python code (maybe better?). But Perl is much more lenient in allowing really really horrible code, which for some reason a lot of people take advantage of.