What's your favorite year end method?

[David Brown]

On Mon, Dec 24, 2007 at 04:57:30PM -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:

>I think it's easy to write inscrutable code in any language.
>I consider python inscrutable too, but I consider Scheme
>elegant and (usually) quite clear.  It's all about what you
>know and what you're comfortable with.  I've also seen
>PERL code that's more understandable that C.
>
>It's not a question of what the language allows.  It's all about
>how the programmer uses it.

There's more to it than that.  Perl allows constructs such as classes and
modules, but they were tacked on later to the language, and it shows.
There just isn't a clear simple way of expressing these things in the
language--they have to done with various idiomatic expressions.

All of these languages (Scheme, Perl and Python) suffer somewhat from a
lack of structured data.  They kind of make up for this by having readily
available hashes, and then making these into things that look like
structured data or classes.

I program regularly in both Perl and Python.  Unless I had a bunch of
existing Perl code, I would choose Python for something new.

Python is the second easiest-to-learn language I've learned, with the first
being Smalltalk.

Dave