On 2016-03-25 10:21 AM, Steve Haddock wrote:
To further digress, What can I say to my old-school collaborator who insists on 
teaching his students PERL, de novo? He claims not to like Python's cryptic 
error reporting. (I agree but there is so much to offset this.) I have tried 
everything including translating his code to Python to show how much cleaner it 
is.
-Steve

I say that when you're in the US, you measure distance in feet and miles, and write dates as month/day/year [1]. Similarly, if you're working with a group that writes Perl, your default should be to write Perl. A lot of us have made a different choice, and been early adopters of technologies that we think are going to be better in the long run, but (a) some people can't afford the luxury of thinking about the long run or (b) feel that they don't know enough to choose a winner [2]. Having at various times preached the gospels of pure functional programming, literate programming, UML, the Semantic Web, cleanroom development, and a few other things I'm now embarrassed to acknowledge, I can't say they're wrong.

Cheers,
Greg

[1] Ask me about the time I showed up a month early for a conference...

[2] If half a dozen people all tell you they have a better X, but each one's "better" is different, the safe thing is to wait for them to sort it out.


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