Re: [xml-dev] parsing markup with Perl

[Ihe Onwuka <ihe.onwuka@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 12:48 PM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif@shlomifish.org> wrote:
>>
>> For example at what point does the amount of math you are doing mean
>> you should be using R/Matlab/Mathematica or Octave. Perhaps if you are
>> a Python Developer and/or know/believe in numpy/scipy the answer may
>> well be never.
>
> Hmmmm... not sure I fully understand your point. I was told some hard-core
> Matlab users (researchers with Ph.D./etc.) etc. use the interactive Matlab REPL
> to manage their files because they are so used to that and are familiar with it
> (and they didn't install or bother learning a decent shell/scripting language
> for Windows).
>

The use case you cite is the reverse possibly even more annoying
scenario  - morphing a DSL into a general purpose language.

This is where you get statistical programmers advocating that
everything should be done in R and making everybody pay the price of
using what is a very irregular language whilst deriving none (through
lack of need) of the domain specific benefits.

>>
>> > Moreover, sometimes writing "ugly"/complicated/inelegant code with some
>> > so-called anti-patterns can go a long way in making sure your code is kept
>> > simple (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle ). This is instead
>> > of using an abstraction that tries to produce the most elegant code any
>> > time, and ends up being hard to learn, use and read (there's some previous
>> > discussion on it in this thread of Sayeret Lambda (an Israeli group of
>> > programming languages' enthusiasts)
>> >
>>
>> People who code in Python but can't grok List Comprehensions use the
>> exact same argument.
>
> It doesn't mean it's not a good argument.

It depends whether the complainer groks them or not. I used to be (and
still am) very critical of automated test tools but I had a
certification in the major test tool on the market at the time.

A list comprehension is nothing more than codified set builder
notation which should be familiar from high school mathematics. But
there are those programming who believe that high school mathematics
has  no utility beyond high school and they make these complaints
layered with a usually baseless efficiency argument - et voila - list
comprehensions are outlawed and their status as programmers on the
team is assured.