Re: [xml-dev] parsing markup with Perl

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

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 2:22 PM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif@shlomifish.org> wrote:
> Hi Ihe,
>

Hello

>
> At times like that, one can really appreciate what Linus Torvalds reportedly
> said that his main job as the kernel chief maintainer is "To say 'No'." or else
> we get many different tools that all have everything including the kitchen
> sink, and many of them were not designed for that.
>

Amen.

>
> Anyway, saying that it is used by people who are against
> using list comprehensions does not necessarily mean it is wrong in all other
> cases, and furthermore may be considered a "guilt by association".
>

Indeed. Lying with dogs get you fleas.

>
> Someone once told me he didn't like lambdas/anonymous functions/closures in
> Perl 5 (he was originally a Perl 4 programmer) and that they are hard to
> understand and that I shouldn't use them. Shortly after Joel on Software wrote
> this post - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html - most
> competent programmers understood that closures are often a good idea and most
> modern languages should support them natively (and the fact that in Python
> lambdas can only have a single expressions leaves a lot to be desired).
>

So the story that I have told once before on this list when I asked my
Scheme professor (an alumnus of yours at Technion) what a closure was
and he said "You know what it is" (because he'd seen me code them)
"You just don't know thats what they are called".

>
> Furthermore, projects often find it useful to standardise on a style guide,
> which constrains the syntax and features that one is allowed to use. Some of my
> patches required amending due to a wrong placement of braces, or because they
> added trailing whitespace, and I rejected patches due to similar reasons. I'm
> not saying that completely forbidding the use of Python's list comprehensions
> is a good idea (and using the alleged lack of utility of high school math as an
> excuse is certainly a poor thing to do), but some coding style rules are
> probably a good idea.[Indent]
>

This is true. However it has an "uncanny" way of  reducing to Fortran
77 with objects, which is a generic way of describing the sort of code
list comprehension abolitionist consider comprehensible.