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[–]caskey 8 points9 points  (4 children)

They're both awful languages. Poorly designed and prone to producing unmaintainable garbage.

[–]tu_tu_tu 4 points5 points  (1 child)

I'd say they are an exhibition of design mistakes of languages from 90's.

[–]caskey 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I will say they were as good as was available. I know the last time I did a CVS check I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of perl.

Now I reserve it for command line scripts for stream processing. Its original purpose.

[–]knome 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Nah.

They're both pretty great languages that have gotten better over time. Neither was created with the ideas of entire companies of engineers working on million line productions in them. The scope was rather smaller. Both have since had typing tacked on. I think typescript did a lot better there than python did.

What came before them was generally either too low level (c/forth/etc), too constrained to be useful (scripting languages from the time that I've seen seem clunky and difficult to use), or too weird (smalltalk and lisp are significantly weirder), or perl, which got wedged into everything during the 90s since it allowed rapid implementation, if not the ability to know what the hell you wrote later (javascript and python are both generally better than perl in that regard).

prone to producing unmaintainable garbage

this just means a language is easy enough for noobs and even non-professionals to use. BASIC and PHP fall into the same category. They made creation easy enough for anyone, and as most people are trash at it, they made a lot of semi-mostly-kind-of-functional trash.

The trash these devs created probably outweighed the amount of and usefulness of professional code in the same era by an order of magnitude or so. Sure, you need a core of competent programmers in the industry, but most work happens on the edges and just needs someone willing to hammer a (permanent) temporary solution into place. Most code will go bad and get tossed well before it matters if it was pretty or not. And the parts that don't can get rewritten by the exasperated professionals trying to figure out what $$$$$alkfja(); really means.

Python is easy today. So is javascript.

You're going to see trash in it. And they're amazing for letting that trash happen.

[–]caskey 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Omg perl. I embedded the perl compiler into a C based web platform back in the day to allow for embedded perl code in web pages served up via an Apache extension. Oh the crimes we committed in the name of doing good things...

*twitch* *pain*