On Jan 10, 2005, at 3:01 PM, benjamin.ferrari wrote:
>> 'there's only ONE way to do it'
>
> No! The correct statement is:
>
> 'There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.'
>
> the _obvious_ is very important here.

actually, while there is some truth to this, i disagree.
there is never only one way to do something, i'm sure i can
point out multiple ways in python to do a single thing.
the fact is, different approaches are required, different
design decisions could be made, and the language should
preferably reflect these decisions well, otherwise you
end up with lots of guess work and implications.

the fact is, python ain't all that bad, but it has a lot
of duplications in its standard lib, i find the "sum" method
for example very stupid, and the duplication of method for
getting the length of a string is eww. not like in ruby
where they are exported via known alias's, but instead
*entirely* different methods for finding the value.

anyways, in the main python gets it right. just a few
shortcomings, but i'm happy to see that with 2.4 its
catching up to ruby, and in some areas, surpassing it,
the functional stuff doesn't really impress me, given
guido's background, i'm surprised there's not more,
doesn't really give it practical use cases though, list
processing via iterators etc in ruby is a neat and readable
solution to most of these problems.

perl otoh, goes very wrong, it provides many many ways
of doing the same thing. and none of them sensible :)
at least while python provides several ways, they are
in most cases, *fairly* sensible, but perl, its just
a long running joke by the authors, i'm sure of it ;)

Alex