On Mon, Mar 02, 2015 at 05:35:42PM +0100, Didier Kryn wrote:
>
> Le 02/03/2015 16:40, Hendrik Boom a écrit :
> >>>Frankly, I've also believe that
> >>>interpreted languages should never be used for anything other than a
> >>>teaching tool.
> >There's one huge advantage of interpreted languages: The code you see in
> >the editor*is* the code you are running. No compiler to leave an
> >obsolete executable around that you might be executing instead.
>

>     I consider weakly typed, or even non-typed languages should
> *never* be used for teaching. Unless one intends to teach loose
> programming.

>

This adds even more confusion to the discussion, as Python (one of the
blamed ones) actually *IS* a strongly-typed language. You might see
*dynamic* typing as a potential issue, and we could even agree on that
to some extent, but that's another story. Please let's try to be fair
and stick to the facts, otherwise the discussion is not useful...

>     Yet I agree interpreted languages are convenient for small
> things, precisely because they are interpreted. Conveniency also
> include fast development and architecture-independant packaging.

>

And as they have already explained above, this is exactly the reason
why some non-critical Debian system utilities (such as debconf or
adduser) are written in Perl or Python :) And they were so cool to
manage to reduce the dependencies of these packages to the bare
minimum (basically, the interpreter).

I would like to point out that this is not just a curse of
Debian. Also other distros and other operating systems (like FreeBSD)
use perl and python scripts for some non-critical system software,
just because sometimes you can do in three lines of Perl what would
require a few hundred lines of C (plus a few additional libraries)...

My2Cents

KatolaZ

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