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

Previous awards

[arnoroefs2000]

In 1998, Larry Wall for his work on Perl and other software.

"Larry Wall won the Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software for his many contributions to the advancement of freely distributed software, most notably Perl, a robust scripting language for sophisticated text manipulation and system management. His other widely-used programs include rn (news reader), patch (development and distribution tool), metaconfig (a program that writes Configure scripts), and the Warp space-war game."

In 1999, Miguel de Icaza for his work on GNOME

"de Icaza headed a team of more than 300 programmers worldwide, most of them volunteers, in the development of GNOME. GNOME is a user-friendly graphical users interface (GUI) and programming platform for GNU/Linux. GNOME 1.0 was first released in March, 1999 and has since had a step-up release."

In 2001, Brian Paul for his ground-breaking work on the Mesa 3D Graphics Library

"The Mesa 3D Graphics Library allows free software users to model and render in full 3D." Jeff Bates, chairman of the Free Software Foundation Awards Committee said. "The library has added tools and capabilities to the GNU/Linux system that are being utilized by people all over the world."

This award goes to all the Python community.

[sinserve]

You know, Guido is the root object, and we all have
the Award attirbute, inherited from out based class.

Re:yeah, but

[TeknoHog]

... did he write Perl? I don't think so.

Somebody wrote Perl? I thought it grew by itself, out of the stray code that had leaked inside hot mainframes from unterminated cables. Python, on the other hand, was designed...

Re:Yes, but...

[Shiny Metal S.]

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.

Most of everything is uter crap. This includes every aspect of human creation.

Few days ago, someone posted this Perl code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use MIME::Base64; $x = ""; while(<&gt) { $x .= $_; $x =~ s/[\r\n\t ]//g; } print decode_base64($x); exit 0;

to which I posted this:

$ perl -0MMIME::Base64 -e 'print decode_base64 <&gt'

a one-liner to be typed directly at a shell prompt, which does exactly the same. Much simpler, isn't it? It's just that, like Larry Wall has well said, Give people enough rope to hang themselves, and they'll usually figure out how not to, after several successes.

I'll give you another good example. Some time ago I tuned Perl code of one Senior Design Technologist (I won't tell you the name of his company, for obvious reasons). This was one of my records, so I have the exact stats. His program had 190 lines of code in 6530 characters and he asked me if the same can be done in more elegant way. I wrote my version from scratch, which had only 13 lines of code in 227 characters, i.e. it was 30 times smaller - it's 3% of original size. It was also over 900% faster than the original (doing exactly the same of course), as a side effect of my elegance-tuning. And no, it wasn't obfuscated and I wasn't writing it just to use as small space as possible. Later I wrote a minimal version of that program and it had 2 lines in 112 characters (including a new-line), so the real 13-lines version was quite readable, with descriptive function and variable names, indentation, etc.

So, my point is: Most of everything is uter crap. This includes Perl code. But it says more about programmers than about the language itself. Like the fact that most of text available on the Internet is crap, doesn't mean that the English or any other natural language is crap.

The problem with newbie Perl programmers is that they usually write in C, not in Perl. The Perl motto is There's More Than One Way To Do It. That means that you can also program using a C-style if you want. This is sometimes very useful, but it's often abused by beginners. So it's very common to see a code like this:

for($index = 0; $index <= $maxindex; $index++){
printf("ITEM: %s\n", $items[$index]);
}

where you could just write:

print "ITEM: $_\n" for @items;

You see my point. I'll quote Larry once again: Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.

That said, I may surprise you, that I am going to learn Python. For few reasons: It's a nice and powerful language, with many unique features (like e.g. the idea of using the indentation to define blocks scope) so it's definitely worth learning, even if it won't be my main language, and the WorldForge AI scripts are written in Python.

OK, I said a lot, much more than I originally wanted to... Now you should tell me something interesting about Python, as a revenge. :)