Re: Choosing Perl/Python for my particular niche

From: Donn Cave (donn_at_drizzle.com)
Date: 03/27/04 

Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2004 16:51:02 -0000

Quoth claird@lairds.com (Cameron Laird):
...
| I *really* don't know how to respond to this; a
| sentence with "sed", "conditional" and "convenient"
| leaves me at a loss.

I personally find sed more frustrating than useful, for anything
past the common one-line application. But I know of a very
accomplished sed programmer for whom it's the other way around -
not only can he solve complex problems in sed, he once professed
to be baffled by the common structured-procedural languages.
I reckon him to be a person of extraordinary intellect, because
of his exceptional ability with sed, but he was pretty firmly
convinced that he couldn't do much with a programming language
like C or Python. Of course not a programmer by trade. I believe
he never did go on to prove himself wrong on that.

In my opinion, it's a matter of very deep learning about how to
solve problems. Most of us were introduced to programming with
procedural languages - BASIC, assembler, Pascal, FORTRAN and so
on, which for all their differences are essentially the same in
principle when it comes to solving a problem. We can move from
one of these languages to another fairly easily, but not sed -
what's the point of such a useless language! But here are these
few, mostly non-programmers, who started with sed and can do
amazing things with it. We see a crippling lack of features,
where they see spartan elegance, because at a very fundamental
level they get it and we don't.

        Donn Cave, donn@drizzle.com

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Is C99 the final C? (some suggestions)
    ... >> inevitably lead to BUS errors, ... > There's ample precedent in other languages ... call stack in a well-defined and programmer controlled way. ... semantics similar to C's function declaration. ...
    (comp.lang.c)
  • Re: Cobol News - Microfocus and AcuCOBOL
    ... I think they are the languages of today. ... I disagree strongly about problems for the programmer. ... It is a hard concept for COBOL people to grasp.. ... functionality comes along, it inherits what is there already and extends it. ...
    (comp.lang.cobol)
  • Re: The Demise of C#
    ... > There are syntactical conveniences (like the string concatenation operator) ... > in both languages would be nice to have at once. ... > Polymorphism to a VB programmer prior to .NET was to use variants. ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet)
  • Re: Not enough parallelism in programming
    ... languages that define what happens when two methods execute in parallel. ... that the outcome is defined well enough that the programmer and user can ... obj1 and obj2 may refer to linked data structures that ... to execute in parallel two pieces of code that might overlap and hence not be parallelizable." ...
    (comp.arch)
  • Re: Why "new"?
    ... search in a counterfactual world where there was an APL IDE named J ... up on programming languages. ... simply where I personally expect a professional software developer who has ... competent programmer can spend 5-10 hours and not only get a HelloWorld ...
    (comp.lang.java.programmer)