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  • From: Dufflebunk <dufflebunk AT dufflebunk.homeip.net>
  • To: Aaron Brice <abrice2 AT cox.net>
  • Cc: sm-sorcery AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars...
  • Date: 08 Oct 2002 23:09:11 -0400

On Tue, 2002-10-08 at 22:10, Aaron Brice wrote:
> 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, $version) = split(":",$_);
There is a bash function called explode which does this in libmisc.
explode <some string> <separator> <array to put results into>

>
> 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.
We also have a libhash.

>
> > 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?
The problem we are having relates less with the language, and more with
the fact that it was never actualy designed properly. Any sufficiently
complex program can be hell to maintain if it was designed badly,
regardless of the language.
The codebase is getting too large for the way it was designed. Not
necessarily for the language it's in.

>
> 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..
Duly noted :)

>
> You can substitute python/ruby/whatever for perl in all of the above..
Can I throw in Erlang?

>
> Aaron

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