<story><title>Three virtues of a great programmer</title><url>https://thethreevirtues.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bamboozled</author><text>I love Python, but basically 96% of Python code and developers absolutely suck at everything, I&amp;#x27;m fixing a shit python codebase right now. It&amp;#x27;s like a language which people love to use to write shit code.</text></item><item><author>bdjsiqoocwk</author><text>And then, python.</text></item><item><author>neilv</author><text>Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris were especially clear&amp;#x2F;obvious in Perl at the time.&lt;p&gt;Perl was a gazillion times more powerful than Bourne and C-shell (including all the Unix shell tools like `awk`), much more rapid than working in C, incredibly terse (perhaps too much so), and also portable (to all the oddball systems you might have).&lt;p&gt;And the purposes to which Perl was put were often to automate things you&amp;#x27;d been doing manually, or that you couldn&amp;#x27;t do without Perl.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;d be quietly doing big things with Perl.  And there were sayings about how you&amp;#x27;d automated your job, and presumably spent your time writing more Perl scripts and reading Usenet.  And the occasional joke of replacing someone else with a one-line Perl script.&lt;p&gt;Also, note that not only was this before the dotcom boom (when programmers suddenly were no longer nerds but getting rich and fashionable), but also-- a lot of the programmers using Perl professionally weren&amp;#x27;t even professional programmers, but actually sysadmins or random university researchers, who happened to have the power of Perl.  The majority of professional programmers on Unix actually didn&amp;#x27;t know Perl.&lt;p&gt;So, Perl people speaking of Perl people in terms of vices could be seen as a self-deprecating, joking spin &lt;i&gt;conscious&lt;/i&gt; of the unusual power that they wielded.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tpmoney</author><text>Python has become my goto for anything more complicated than a 3 line bash script, but not so complex it need multiple files to logically separate the code. Argparse isn&amp;#x27;t perfect, but it lets you get 90% of the way to a nice functional argument parsing system, with auto-generated help output that mostly doesn&amp;#x27;t suck. It&amp;#x27;s also built in so I can rely on it being anywhere python is already installed. And python is ubiquitous enough in default installs now I can pretty much rely on it being present as much as I can rely on bash being present.&lt;p&gt;As a result, every command line bit of glue code I&amp;#x27;ve written for the last decade or so has been in python. At a certain point, it does start to get unwieldy and you can indeed write some awful code in it, but then again, I&amp;#x27;ve seen some pretty awful bash scripts too.&lt;p&gt;My favorite trick is the fact that you can tell python to</text></comment>
<story><title>Three virtues of a great programmer</title><url>https://thethreevirtues.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bamboozled</author><text>I love Python, but basically 96% of Python code and developers absolutely suck at everything, I&amp;#x27;m fixing a shit python codebase right now. It&amp;#x27;s like a language which people love to use to write shit code.</text></item><item><author>bdjsiqoocwk</author><text>And then, python.</text></item><item><author>neilv</author><text>Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris were especially clear&amp;#x2F;obvious in Perl at the time.&lt;p&gt;Perl was a gazillion times more powerful than Bourne and C-shell (including all the Unix shell tools like `awk`), much more rapid than working in C, incredibly terse (perhaps too much so), and also portable (to all the oddball systems you might have).&lt;p&gt;And the purposes to which Perl was put were often to automate things you&amp;#x27;d been doing manually, or that you couldn&amp;#x27;t do without Perl.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;d be quietly doing big things with Perl.  And there were sayings about how you&amp;#x27;d automated your job, and presumably spent your time writing more Perl scripts and reading Usenet.  And the occasional joke of replacing someone else with a one-line Perl script.&lt;p&gt;Also, note that not only was this before the dotcom boom (when programmers suddenly were no longer nerds but getting rich and fashionable), but also-- a lot of the programmers using Perl professionally weren&amp;#x27;t even professional programmers, but actually sysadmins or random university researchers, who happened to have the power of Perl.  The majority of professional programmers on Unix actually didn&amp;#x27;t know Perl.&lt;p&gt;So, Perl people speaking of Perl people in terms of vices could be seen as a self-deprecating, joking spin &lt;i&gt;conscious&lt;/i&gt; of the unusual power that they wielded.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bdjsiqoocwk</author><text>Because it&amp;#x27;s so easy the average quality of the user is lower. This isn&amp;#x27;t surprising to me.</text></comment>