in reply to How do you define "elegant"?

You have to take the Jargon File with a bit of salt. While it's been around for a long time, the most recent/popular version has been edited/addedto/maintained by Eric Raymond (esr). While esr has contributed greatly to OSS (Cathedral and Bazaar), he was an earlier adopter of python and in his zeal to support python, he's been critical of perl.

-derby

Update: You can read esr's side here.

Update again: From esr's article:

``More than one way to do it'' lent flavor and expressiveness at a small scale, but made it significantly harder to maintain consistent style across a wider code base. And many of the features that were later patched into Perl to address the complexity-control needs of bigger programs (objects, lexical scoping, ``use strict'', etc.) had a fragile, jerry-rigged feel about them.

We need a term similar to truthiness for this ... I suggest robustiness. Doesn't matter what the benchmarks say ... since the code feels more robust then it is, in fact, more robust.

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Re^2: How do you define "elegant"?
by Mr. Muskrat (Canon) on Aug 17, 2006 at 15:38 UTC
    I don't think that it will make one bit of difference but I contacted Eric about the entries for Perl and Python. My email boiled down to this; if the Jargon Files is supposed to be "a common heritage of the hacker culture" then he needs to loose the bias and personal opinions.
[reply]
      I hope he takes your comment to heart. Here is the listing for Python:

      Python: /pi:´thon/ In the words of its author, “the other scripting language” (other than Perl, that is). Python's design is notably clean, elegant, and well thought through; it tends to attract the sort of programmers who find Perl grubby and exiguous. Some people revolt at its use of whitespace to define logical structure by indentation, objecting that this harks back to the horrible old fixed-field languages of the 1960s. Python's relationship with Perl is rather like the BSD community's relationship to Linux — it's the smaller party in a (usually friendly) rivalry, but the average quality of its developers is generally conceded to be rather higher than in the larger community it competes with. There's a Python resource page at http://www.python.org. See also Guido, BDFL.


      That is just a bit biased.
[reply]
        It's also kind of funny, because around the same time he predicted that Linux would take over from FreeBSD despite the difference between average skill level that he claimed to have identified.

        ESR's an odd guy, and he got odder after the success of the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" essay...

        There have been a lot of complaints about him abusing the jargon file, e.g. this slashdot story: ESR Recasts Jargon File in Own Image

[reply]
        That is exactly why I sent the email. Both entries are biased and if they are then what other entries have had a slant put on them?
[reply]

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