Re: [Gnu-arch-users] OT: Lisp

[Charles Duffy]

On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 02:11, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 01:03:53AM -0600, Charles Duffy wrote:
> > On Wed, 2003-11-19 at 20:47, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> > > Certainly all the languages common in the real world [...] don't have
> > > any singular focus on one particular technique.
> > 
> >         "There is more than one way to do it".
> >         
> >         "There is only one Right Way to do it."
> >         
> >         "Everything is an object."
> >         
> > Any of these sound familiar?
> 
> Yeah. The first is a quote from Larry Wall, underlining how perl
> doesn't focus on any particular technique, but instead endeavours to
> enable you to do whatever you want.

...and yet, the result of this endevour is a very clear (or, some might
argue, very muddy) set of language characteristics which sharply divide
perl from most other languages. Perl code tends to have a particular
flavor (though very heavily influenced by the author's individual
tendencies); I'm quite certain that code transcribed to C from Perl and
code transcribed to C from Java, for instance, would be trivially
distinguishable in all but the most unusual circumstances.

My point here (beyond tired rambling) is that Perl code *does* in fact
have some sort of technique that it encourages -- except that I doubt
that anyone, Larry Wall included, knows exactly what that technique
happens to be.

> I don't know where you got the second one from. Nor does
> google.

It's a misquote, I think, of GvR (though I could be wrong about that).
Would have to go do some research to find out what the *correct* quote
is. (Not that the statement was presented as true in and of itself, but
rather in the context of contrasting Python's tendency to lead the user
towards a single way of stating an algorithm as opposed to Perl's...
well, you know how Perl is. :))

> The third is from the design for perl6, a language which doesn't exist
> yet, but which already has many pages of design outline describing all
> the different things that are being combined in it.

Okay, perl6 works -- though I was thinking "ruby" at the time that I
wrote it, and I'm quite sure that ruby predates perl6.

> What's your point? None of this seems relevant to the discussion at
> hand, except to demonstrate that perl doesn't fit the category of
> languages with a focus on one singular technique (which everybody knew
> already; perl is probably the antithesis of this).

I made those quotes with three separate languages in mind. Frankly, I
think it's a bit telling that you take my parent to be all about perl.