sm-sorcery AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Discussion of Sorcery related topics
List archive
- From: Aaron Brice <abrice2 AT cox.net>
- To: Nick Jennings <nkj AT namodn.com>
- Cc: sm-sorcery AT lists.ibiblio.org
- Subject: Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars...
- Date: 08 Oct 2002 19:10:12 -0700
On Tue, 2002-10-08 at 10:02, Nick Jennings wrote:
> Since when was a perl one-liner ever acknowledged for being "simple" ?
>
Ok, using the term one-line perl function brings up the wrong
conotations, but I'm not talking about obfuscated perl here, I'm talking
about being able to do things like:
($tmpspell, $updatedDate, $status, $version) = split(":",$_);
with the /var/state/sorcery/packages file. That's much clearer than the
bash alternative of multiple grep/echo/cut's. Hashes are also a big
advantage. Sorcery does a lot of file parsing and string manipulation,
which is just so much easier in perl.
> Design is the issue, not language, and I'm convinced we could improve
> our tools immensly, even if we stayed with bash.
>
Yeah, but don't you think the language has a large impact on design?
Would you be saying the same thing if sorcery were written in BASIC? I
was all for using bash for a long time. But lately I've changed my
mind. Mostly because of the many problems sorcery has had lately, I
really think using perl would make for less bugs. For one thing,
simpler code translates to less bugs, and also perl does a better job of
finding them and giving you good useful error codes than bash does. It
just seems like the codebase is getting too large for bash to handle,
and the advantages of using bash seem to be pretty minor the more I
think about it. It's nice that sorcery doesn't depend on perl, but as
mentioned before, who's running linux without perl? Anymore that's like
saying sorcery shouldn't be dependent on grep. It's nice that any SA
can modify the sorcery scripts without prior programming knowledge, but
in reality how practical is this, especially as the code gets larger?
How much code has been submitted by people that weren't familiar with
any programming languages?
Ryan's right that it's too early to be worrying about it, but I don't
hang out on IRC where these things seem to be discussed so I wanted to
throw my 2 cents in while I can..
You can substitute python/ruby/whatever for perl in all of the above..
Aaron
-
Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars...
, (continued)
- Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars..., Ryan Abrams, 10/08/2002
- Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars..., M.L., 10/09/2002
- Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars..., Bearcat M. Sandor, 10/09/2002
- Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars..., Robin, 10/10/2002
- Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars..., ML, 10/10/2002
- Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars..., Robin, 10/10/2002
- Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars..., Ryan Abrams, 10/10/2002
- Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars..., Tony Smith, 10/08/2002
- Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars..., Dufflebunk, 10/08/2002
-
Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars...,
Aaron Brice, 10/08/2002
- Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars..., Dufflebunk, 10/08/2002
- Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars..., Aaron Brice, 10/08/2002
-
Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars...,
Sergey A Lipnevich, 10/08/2002
-
Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars...,
Tony Smith, 10/08/2002
-
Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars...,
Sergey A Lipnevich, 10/08/2002
-
Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars...,
Tony Smith, 10/08/2002
- Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars..., Sergey A Lipnevich, 10/08/2002
-
Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars...,
Tony Smith, 10/08/2002
-
Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars...,
Sergey A Lipnevich, 10/08/2002
-
Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars...,
Tony Smith, 10/08/2002
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