The Fine Print: The following comments
are owned by whomever posted them.
( Reply )
|
Re: Oh no...
by Dolio on Tuesday 13/Sep/2005, @09:48
|
Are you serious?
First, you're upset over 50 megs of disk space? Hard drives cost 50 cents per _gigabyte_ these days. Python costs you two and a half pennies to store. Give me your address and I'll send you a quarter, so you can store 10 copies of Python, and stop worrying. :)
Second, it's no more feasible to pick one scripting language and make it fit everyone's preferences than it is to pick either Gnome or KDE and make everyone happy. You wouldn't like it if someone decided that Gnome was The Linux Desktop and forced (somehow) everyone to stop working/using KDE, would you?
Third, this is only a build-time dependency. If you're so concerned about not having Python installed, then get a pre-built version of KDE.
Fourth, is there actually a mainstream Linux distribution that doesn't include Python? I thought it was almost as standard as Perl and a C compiler.
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
Re: Oh no...
by Me on Tuesday 13/Sep/2005, @12:11
|
>First, you're upset over 50 megs of disk space? Hard drives cost 50 cents per >_gigabyte_ these days. Python costs you two and a half pennies to store. Give >me your address and I'll send you a quarter, so you can store 10 copies of >Python, and stop worrying. :)
The main point was the first part of the reply but you chose to ignore it for some reason.
>Second, it's no more feasible to pick one scripting language and make it fit >everyone's preferences
No realistically, it's just about not wanting to take a decision not to hurt the feeeeeeelings of 2 or 3 people.
> than it is to pick either Gnome or KDE and make >everyone happy. You
> wouldn't like it if someone decided that Gnome was The >Linux Desktop and
> forced (somehow) everyone to stop working/using KDE, would >you?
KDE, GNOME, Linux, *BSD, [add your favorite open source project here] will never succeed if there's no standards, integration, consistency. If it's going to be eternally just bits from here and there slapped together with no coherence whatsoever, that is if everyone has their way.
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
Re: Oh no...
by Dolio on Tuesday 13/Sep/2005, @16:41
|
> No realistically, it's just about not wanting to take a decision not to hurt the feeeeeeelings of 2 or 3 people.
No. People invent various languages because they're unsatisfied with the existing ones, and think that theirs is better. Programmers gravitate towards languages that they prefer. Until you turn everyone into mindless automatons, there will never be a single language that everyone prefers over every other, and therefore, there will always be more than one language.
It's not a decision that anyone can make or enforce. If you think otherwise, you must be living in some alternate reality that I'm not aware of.
> KDE, GNOME, Linux, *BSD, [add your favorite open source project here]
> will never succeed if there's no standards, integration, consistency.
> If it's going to be eternally just bits from here and there slapped
> together with no coherence whatsoever, that is if everyone has their way.
First of all, that's bull. Windows has just as much inconsistency, lack of integration, and lack of standards compliance as Linux, if not more. That has not prevented it from capturing and maintaining a hold on around 90% of desktop PCs.
Second, it's not as if Gnome, KDE and whoever don't work together on standards and integration when it makes sense. However, there are some things that are impossible to integrate. Qt is not GTK, and it probably never will be. As long as there are people who prefer each, they will continue to exist, and no amount of whining or philosophizing is going to change that. It's also not going to prevent Linux from making inroads on the desktop, because it doesn't really matter to most people.
People coming from Windows are used to inconsistency. They're used to using programs with 7 different widget sets, and a myriad of different user interface decisions; they can live with two on Linux if they absolutely must. Suggesting that this is a significant stumbling point of Linux in the view of the average person is laughable. Linux desktops are already much more consistent than Windows desktops, yet that fact isn't harming Windows in any significant way.
Similarly, the average person doesn't care whether their programs are written in Python, Perl, Ruby, C++ or Brainfuck (let alone what languages are required for the build system of their programs). All they care is that they work. And at 2.5 cents or less per language, they can afford to have all of those installed, so that programmers can work in whatever they find suits the task best. Suggesting we should get rid of all but one because you find it to be somehow philosophically cleaner is nonsense.
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
|
Re: Oh no...
by Guillaume Laurent on Tuesday 13/Sep/2005, @11:58
|
Yeah, and people need to settle on one single desktop, and stop making bugs in their code, etc... ain't gonna happen, in the meantime let's be a tad bit pragmatic. Python is quite well enough established for this to be a reasonable choice.
(and choosing Tcl over Python because it takes less disk space is simply asinine).
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
Re: Oh no...
by Me on Tuesday 13/Sep/2005, @12:24
|
> Yeah, and people need to settle on one single desktop, and stop making bugs
> in their code, etc... ain't gonna happen, in the meantime let's be a tad bit
> pragmatic. Python is quite well enough established for this to be a
> reasonable choice.
Within one particular distro yes, it would make sense to pick one single desktop.
Besides I use Slackware, Python is a not a dependancy at all, it's there though, if you want it you can have it. But you're free not to install it if you don't need it.
> (and choosing Tcl over Python because it takes less disk space is simply
> asinine).
Religious? Anyway we'll talk about that again in a few months when another scripting language will be all the rage...
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
Re: Oh no...
by Me on Tuesday 13/Sep/2005, @12:25
|
> Yeah, and people need to settle on one single desktop, and stop making bugs
> in their code, etc... ain't gonna happen, in the meantime let's be a tad bit
> pragmatic. Python is quite well enough established for this to be a
> reasonable choice.
Within one particular distro yes, it would make sense to pick one single desktop.
Besides I use Slackware, Python is a not a dependancy at all, it's there though, if you want it you can have it. But you're free not to install it if you don't need it.
> (and choosing Tcl over Python because it takes less disk space is simply
> asinine).
Religious? Anyway we'll talk about that again in a few months when (yet) another scripting language will be all the rage...
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
Re: Oh no...
by ac on Tuesday 13/Sep/2005, @13:10
|
> Besides I use Slackware, Python is a not a dependancy at all, it's there though,
> if you want it you can have it. But you're free not to install it if you don't
> need it.
I fully agree with you.
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
Re: Oh no...
by Guillaume Laurent on Tuesday 13/Sep/2005, @22:11
|
> Religious?
No, I've used both, Tcl doesn't scale (in terms of lines of code) as well as Python.
> Anyway we'll talk about that again in a few months when (yet) another scripting language will be all the rage...
Oh please. There are only 3 "viable" scripting languages : Perl, Python and Ruby. Perl is thankfully fading away, Python has its quirks but is the most mature, and Ruby is gaining ground but still needs "packaging" (its libs need to be documented for instance). Even though Ruby has been around for a long time it has only received wide exposure for about three years now. When was the last time a new scripting language was actually "all the rage" ? Python is as standard as a distrib component can get, get over it.
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
Re: Oh no...
by ac on Wednesday 14/Sep/2005, @00:26
|
> Perl is thankfully fading away
Any values to back this up ? Perl is stronger than ever these days.
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
Re: Oh no...
by Guillaume Laurent on Wednesday 14/Sep/2005, @00:36
|
None whatsoever, I gladly admit this is based both on wishful thinking and random observation (I see more headlines about Python and Ruby than about Perl, and Larry Wall's "Apocalypses" about the upcoming Perl 6 are, hmm, well...).
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
Re: Oh no...
by ac on Wednesday 14/Sep/2005, @00:53
|
> None whatsoever, I gladly admit this is based both on wishful thinking and
> random observation (I see more headlines about Python and Ruby than about Perl.
And I keep hearing more about Ruby than Python these days so what.
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
Re: Oh no...
by renox on Sunday 25/Sep/2005, @07:12
|
True, even though Python is more used, Ruby is "in" those day.
Still Ruby will need more than a web framework to sustain the hype.
Anyway I fully support Guillaume in hoping that Perl will die, though it will take time it is probably more used than Python+Ruby together.
But there are troubles in the Perl world: they don't manage to make Perl6, which (IMHO!) sucks also anyway..
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
Re: Oh no...
by Scott Wheeler on Thursday 15/Sep/2005, @01:09
|
Perl was all the rage in the late 90s with the web boom and the widespread emergence of web apps, for which Perl was usually the language of choice. By the end of the 90s Java was eroding the high end of that market and PHP the low end. As a general purpose scripting language Python and Ruby weren't as established.
I also think that some of the shift has been due to paradigm shifts in people learning to program. Despite it being possible to do OOP with Perl, it's ugly; Perl really is just better suited for iterative programming. In the mid-90s new programmers were starting off with iterative languages, so Perl was a more natural transition.
Today, on the other hand most new programmers start with object oriented languages and learn to think in object oriented terms. As such it's natural that those people would gravitate towards object oriented scripting languages such as Ruby and Python.
(And I should note at this point that I know Perl very well and don't know Ruby or Python -- so this isn't a Python-love-fest, just something I've observed.)
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
Re: Oh no...
by Me on Thursday 15/Sep/2005, @08:12
|
> get over it.
Why should I?
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
Re: Oh no...
by ac on Thursday 15/Sep/2005, @12:04
|
Because you won't be the one to fix it anyway?
|
[
Reply To This | View ]
|
|
The Fine Print: The previous
comments are owned by whomever posted them.
( Reply )
|
|
![[KDE Dot News]](http://www.kde.org/dot/Images/kdedotnews.gif)
