Re: Why context-free?

anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)
14 Oct 2005 17:19:29 -0400

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From: anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 14 Oct 2005 17:19:29 -0400
Organization: Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien
References: 05-10-053 05-10-061 05-10-083
Keywords: design, comment
Posted-Date: 14 Oct 2005 17:19:29 EDT

Darius Blasband <darius@raincode.com> writes:
>[Python has a much cleaner syntax than perl, but never got perl's critical
>mass.


Well, the data I have on programming language popularity
<http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/comp.lang-statistics/>
certainly indicates that Python got a critical mass. Indeed, it seems
to gain popularity, while Perl seems to lose popularity; indeed,
Python seems to be more popular than perl since 2003. Of course, my
methodology for estimating the popularity is questionable (as is any I
have seen), but it certainly indicates that Python is very popular.


> I think this tells us that syntactic elegance isn't a big issue for
>language users. -John]


Conversely, maybe the increase in the popularity of Python is based on
its syntactic characteristsics, at least in part.


Disclaimer: I have never programmed in Python, and very little
in Perl.


- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
[I think if you look at the number of people running web sites in perl
vs. in python, perl still wins big. There's nothing wrong with python,
but it's not enough nicer than perl to get me to give up the vast CPAN
libraries. -John]

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