Re: [tlug] shell question

[Alain Hoang <hoanga@example.com>]

On Apr 16, 2004, at 9:16 PM, Josh Glover wrote:

> Quoth Stephen J. Turnbull (Fri 2004-04-16 04:03:23PM +0900):
>
>>>>>>> "Alain" == Alain Hoang <hoanga@example.com> writes:
>>
>>     Alain> And for those of us with a penchant for even more niche
>>     Alain> programming languages....
>
> Ruby is niche? If I wanted niche, I would whip up something in 
> Brainf*ck.

	If you wish.  But I have no wish to read any of that Brainfart stuff.  
  My
mind is already fragile enough without having to force myself to read
something that looks like the  mating of Morse code and a doctor's 
handwriting  :-)

>
>
>>     Alain> 
>> http://samsara.bebear.net/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/al/rublog.cgi/scripts/
>>     Alain> changing_lines_in_files.html
>>
>> Wow!  Whoever thought up that syntax must be systematically bent!
>> To each his own, of course, but I'd rather write Perl, I think!

> I must agree that this syntax is hard to grok. I have never looked at
> Ruby before.
>

	Hmm, well I was posting the code more for an inspiration
of how to solve the original poster's problem.  Most of the code
in my diary is probably not the best representation of nice
looking Ruby code.  So I guess you can point all arrows for giving
a bad example of Ruby code at me.  :-)


>> One of the things I like about Python is that the language is
>> _designed_.  It may not to be your taste, and that's fine.  As Larry
>> Wall says, there's always more than one way to do things.  But with
>> Python, once I started to grok pythonicity, the new language features
>> just seem to grow naturally (no like-moss-or-mold jokes, please) out
>> of the language.  YMWV.
>
> I found Python quite a pleasure to code in, once I got over the initial
> hump of "this ain't exactly C". :)
>
>
	Python isn't bad at all.  My favorite features of Python and
Ruby are the tools  that let's you 'have a conversation' with the
interpreter so you can type in statements and see the results
almost instantly.   The whitespace and syntax stuff used to matter
to me.   But they started mattering less to me after awhile when
writing code.
	However when it comes to reading code (which
I end up doing much more often) I find that the enforced whitespace
rules of Python make it harder to make the code a pain to read
unlike most of the Perl programs I've had the (dis)pleasure of
looking through.  Of course there are some very nice examples
of Perl code as well.

	I think an oddly disappointing experience with Python/Ruby/Perl
is that after about 15-30 lines of code I'm done with what I wanted to 
get
done.   I always feel like there's something wrong and I should
be writing a longer program.   But then again my most common usage
for these scripts is when I find trying the logic I want to write in 
Bourne
shell getting really difficult.  That is about the time I switch over.

Alain