[Chicago-talk] Sharing my pain

[Jim Thomason]

> Yeah.  Ok.  My question was actually: What about this code makes this
> make people want to use Python?

Shhhh! That's the secret you're not supposed to let out!

There are people that legitimately argue that python or lisp or ruby
or smalltalk or whatever are much better because you can only write
things one way, so it's easier to maintain, so when the maintenance
programmer comes out and determines you're a schmuck it's immediately
obvious to him what you were doing and he can re-factor it easily.

This is, of course, a total crock. Bad programmers are bad programmers
and can screw up things like you wouldn't imagine regardless of the
language.

Admittedly, there's a lot of bad perl code out there, but all this
tells me is that a lot of bad programmers use it. But, also, a lot of
programmers are just bad. There may not be statistically more bad perl
programmers than in other languages, you just may see more of the
code. Perl is available all over the internet. How much open source
cobol do you look at on a daily basis?

-Jim....