What's your favorite year end method?

[Donald Allen]

On Dec 23, 2007 12:15 PM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
> "Donald Allen" <donaldcallen at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > No insult intended, but Paul Graham once observed that Perl programs
> > look like a cartoon character swearing. One of the problems with the
> > current Scheme implementation is that it's, well, Scheme, and
> > therefore hard to read for people who aren't fluent in Lisp, the
> > majority. I think Perl, powerful though it may be, is very hard to
> > read. Tcl, too, and I've written a hell of a lot of Tcl code. This is
> > the reason for my enthusiasm for Python -- it's easy to write concise,
> > readable programs. Graham also observed that we spend a lot more time
> > reading code than writing it. So I fear that writing reports in Perl
> > smacks a bit of going from the frying pan into the fire.
>
> Keep in mind that the reason for moving away from scheme isn't how the
> language looks, but the (thin) field of developers who can actually
> use the language.  I suspect there are a LOT of PERL devs out there..
> Certainly many more than there are Scheme devs.  Not that I'm arguing
> for PERL as the new reporting language, but let's keep focused on the
> goal, which requires us to explicitly state the goals.
>
> > I have no intention of starting a language flame war here, and I've
> > been doing this for long enough (43 years professionally) to know this
> > is a religious issue. I'd just hate to see this project repeat a past
> > mistake. My $.02.
>
> And which "past mistake" would that be?  I'm not trying to start
> a religious war, either, I'm just trying to understand where you're
> coming from and what you mean.

Because people aren't paid the big bucks to work on gnucash, the
project is perhaps more vulnerable to turnover than commercial
projects, where people can be held onto with financial incentives that
take years to vest. So while I think code readability is important in
any setting, it's particularly important here.

I think Scheme was a mistake precisely because there are relatively
few people who are "fluent" in it (I will, of course, defend the
semantic and even syntactic beauty of the language to the death :-).
There may also be a performance issue with this particular
implementation (guile), but that's irrelevant to this discussion.

I think Perl could be a mistake because it's so easy to write
inscrutable code in it. Yes, there are far more people who know Perl
than Scheme, as you correctly point out, but I think the outcome could
well be the same (I've seen this with people implementing large
systems in Tcl, which is just not suitable for that sort of thing).
That's what I'm worried about.

/Don

>
> Thanks,
>
> > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
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>
>
> -derek
>
> --
>        Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>        Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>        URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>        warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
>