Re: C/C++ development

["Douglas A. Tutty" <dtutty%vianet.ca@localhost>]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 03:45:23PM +0100, Matthias Scheler wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 10:12:05AM -0400, matthew sporleder wrote:
> > How do you know it's not already a python script?  I find this
> > recommendation (and anti-recommendation) pretty funny.
> 
> In my experience Python scripts should never be more complicated than
> a C or C++ application. They may however be (significantly) less
> performant and scalable or use more use more resources to run.
> 
> I also believe that it is unlikely that somebody who writes
> unmaintainable complicated Python scripts will be able to write
> maintable, simple or even working C or C++ code. C and C++ are
> both complicated programming languages.
> 
> > Perl seems to have been working okay for many people in many
> > applications for at least fifteen years (22 years since perl 1).
> 
> We are currently moving from Perl to Python at work because Perl
> code is frequently "write-only": it is hard to understand for
> anybody except the developer who wrote it. And even the developer
> who wrote it frequently cannot understand his or her code after
> a few weeks.

I find that there's a nice flow, when an app gets too big (re resources
used, scaling, etc) to move from python to Ada.  I'm not saying that
Python is really Ada script, but that, other than strong typing, the
readability and maintainability are strong.  This is especially usefull,
to me, when I have an app that I wrote 10 years ago that now needs
changing.  

I have a lot of time invested in Python.  However, Python will be making
a big change when it goes from 2.x to 3.x (e.g. print statement moving
to a print function) that will mean a lot of rewriting for me.  While
I'm rewriting anyway, large apps will probably be rewritten in Ada.

Doug.