Perl, Python and noo perl

[Damien Elmes]

Jeremy <jepri at webone.com.au> writes:

>> excessive. Unfortunately the more arcane ways of accomplishing a task there
>> is, the more instances of hard to understand code will crop up, as people
>> exercise their ego or their desire to be obtuse.
>
> There is a difference between doing it different ways and doing it
> pathologically.  If a programmer starts inserting gratuitous line noise into
> his programs then s/he's earnt a 'carreer directions meeting' with her/his
> employer.  But a programmer shouldn't have to give up, say functional
> programming constructs because the shop language is a BDSM object-orientated
> language.

Agreed. I'm not sure if you were directing that at python, as python supports
map/filter/reduce etc and can be quite useful as a functional language. It's
making a lot of inroads in the biology and chemistry fields, in preference to
lisp or perl, and its functional aspects certainly help that cause.

> It certainly lacks the shortcuts of a more traditional OO language, but it can
> also do a few tricks that few OO languages can get close to.

Any examples? With python you can do crazy tricks such as changing the base
classes of a particular instance on the fly. It's also trivial to customise the
methods used to set and extract attributes, which is very powerful.

-- 
Damien Elmes