Perl Critique

www.oreilly.com -- Why I Promote Python

A very weak paper of high educational value:  I think that almost everything the author states about languages is wrong ;-). From one point of view the author does not recognize the right for existence of complex non-orthogonal languages, from the other he does not understand the value of TCL-style languages that presuppose usage of compiled language (C in case of TCL) for implementation of low level functions. From the third he does not recognize that C is a very elegant language that abstracts the most important features of contemporary CPUs.  He also thing that there is free lunch and you can have all desirable features in one language (Python in the author opinion).  As for scalability he is right about Perl (no clean way of interfacing with C and C++) and wrong about TCL which was designed to have a clean interface with C. And he naively believes in the power of OOP and consider creating a complex set of class the way to achieving scalability not the way to obscure the system to the point when it's easier to rewrite them from scratch then to use them and that for some reason this is more powerful approach the two level approach promoted by TCL.  Anyway such an advertising of Python makes it highly suspect and forces to look Perl more attractive ;-)

Where languages like Basic, TCL, and Logo were artificially limiting, C++ and Perl are, in my opinion, artificially complex. Obviously there are many smart people out there preparing to send me an email claiming that the complexity "buys" them something valuable. I think that the cost is high.

>I am not entirely naive: Computer programming is hard. It is precisely because it is hard that there is no excuse for adding artificial obstacles like modern languages rooted in the idioms of dead languages, and adding syntaxes so complex that humans cannot keep them in their head.

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My primary criteria for decency--whether in programming languages, markup languages, or graphical systems--is scalability. By scalability, I mean two things: the ability to scale from easy to difficult problems and the ability for beginners and experts to be comfortable.

Consider an episode from my own life. I was around nine or ten years old and my father taught me how to do things on our Apple II using Basic. My dad was always much more of a hardware rather than software guy. Whenever I would tell him I wanted to do something more complex than we could find in the Basic manual, he would say, "You have to do that in assembly language, and assembly is too hard for a kid." He didn't mean to shut me down but he also didn't know 6502 assembly language himself and was not in much of a position to teach it to me.

The effect, though, was that my travel down the path to programmer enlightenment was delayed for several years. The Basic dialect was (like today's "TCL") designed for beginners and had many arbitrary limitations built in. Assembly was designed for programmers and made no concessions to usability, intuitiveness, or learning. Neither was scalable.

Today we have Perl, TCL, and C++: all non-scalable in their own way. C++ and Perl only make sense if you have a particular programming background. If you did not come from the "Unix tradition", many of their conventions and idioms seem alien.

Consider the modern nine-year-old boy trying to configure and extend his Linux system. He would find that many string-processing programs are inexplicably written in C: one of a very few languages that does not even have a first-class string data type! Most of the GUIs would be written in C++, despite the inflexibility of the language. Many other programs are written in a variety of illegible dialects within the family of languages called "Perl".

C and assembly have historical reasons for being so low-level and thus difficult to use and learn. It makes sense sometimes to trade usability for performance. C++ and Perl have no such excuse. They are cryptic and complex because of an overemphasis on backwards compatibility and plain, old-fashioned poor design.

Where languages like Basic, TCL, and Logo were artificially limiting, C++ and Perl are, in my opinion, artificially complex. Obviously there are many smart people out there preparing to send me an email claiming that the complexity "buys" them something valuable. I think that the cost is high.

When you use some wickedly cool and obscure feature of the language, you reduce the number of potential readers of your code. Ideally the language would encourage you to concentrate your creativity on high-level design. Choosing algorithms and data structures is hard enough. Keeping all of the library functions in your head is also tricky. On top of all of this, programmers should not need to decipher obscure core language features. Why make life harder for those who will follow you?

Personally, I cannot stand this design aesthetic, because it divides the world into "programmers" and "non-programmers". My dream is a world wherein all but the very lowest levels and tightest loops of programs are written in a language that is so simple that it can be taught in primary school as a first language; where every word-processor user who can write a macro can at least try to dive into their word processor's source code to fix a bug, because the macro language is also the implementation language.

We know that such a language exists. Python is easy enough to be a first language and powerful enough to write object databases (like ZODB) and in-memory relational database engines (like Gadfly). And yet, you do not have to come to grips with a complex and difficult type system to use it, and there are few magical variables and functions. I believe it to be as flexible as Smalltalk and as feature-full as Perl; and yet it is as easy as Basic or TCL.

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Python may or may not be the language that brings about a Computer-Programming-for-Everybody world. But it is currently the best contender. When there is a better horse, I'll switch my bet. The hard part for a competitive system is building a sophisticated class library; but if the language is good enough, it will find early adherents that will do the work, as Python has.

A hint to would-be language developers: If your language runs on the JVM as JPython does, you get the benefit of the Java library "for free". Being Open Source is also a necessity today.

Power, elegance, simplicity, equality, liberty, fraternity: This is heady stuff, and it explains the evangelical tone of some Python programmers. I promote Python because doing so is the right thing.

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