TelFOSS Meeting Review + Slides
Yesterday we had another Tel Aviv Free and Open Source Software meeting.
The meeting took place at a new venue provided by Amir. The venue was Shenkar engineering and design school in Ramat Gan (which is like an extension of Tel Aviv - so it's cool :)
A lot of people came to the meeting, and it was very nice to see so many new faces. This time we had a review of "Programming Pearls" which Shlomi Fish gave, followed by a lecture on Source Code Management systems (also called Version Control Systems) given by me.
It was a refreshing experience to speak of something that all programmers had in common and although I thought we're going to have tackles of "Git vs. Subversion vs. whatever", we didn't. We had interesting discussions on programming paradigms, policies and programming conventions and how SCMs can help or impede them.
Later on two Python programmers from the Israeli Python web programmers group who came to the event joined Shlomi, Gabor and me and we went to a restaurant where we continued the discussions and dined.
Overall, it was a pleasant experience. It was a kind reminder of the warm feeling of supportive communities and subcommunities. It was also nice to see people who were fluent with SCMs (to whom the lecture probably added no real value) but came for the added value of community. I honestly appreciate it.
I've uploaded the slides I used for my lecture - available here [1]. The lecture itself was an hour and a half, so the slides only accompanied and don't relay the entire content.
Next meeting I will be attending is a Haifa.pm meeting that will take place on Apr. 28th. Gabor and I will be speaking of Perl programming for Android. We'll show how to set up your environment, how programming Perl on Android works and a few examples to get you started. Hopefully by then I'll be able to set up Plack + Dancer on my phone.
Kudos to those organizing the meetings: Shlomi Fish for TelFOSS (and TelAviv.pm), Shmuel Fomberg for Haifa.pm and Gabor Szabo for Rehovot.pm.
[1] http://www.slideshare.net/xSawyer/source-code-management-systems
Gots to do the bloggingz
I have done shell programming as long as I've been doing anything on computers. I have written some large awk/sed/ksh(bash) scripts to solve more complicated problems. Years ago I was encouraged to learn perl. I did. I now use it almost exclusively for these tasks and enjoy it.
Is python better than perl? I did a general search of 'perl vs python' on the web but the results seem to be biased toward python. I took a look at perl.org hoping to find an evaluation biased toward perl but didn't. I eventually found this blog and your post where you had mentioned eating dinner with some python programmers. I'm interested in knowing, from someone whose biased toward perl, their 'perl vs python' opinion.
I presume this topic, i.e., from the perl bias, would/should be available someplace. Maybe you could simply answer with a link?
Thanks.
ps. subversion is better than git 'cause that's the one I know and use. :-)
Harry, each programmer gets accustomed to her own habits, we all have our favorite hammer, so to speak.
There are compelling arguments for each language (both Python and Perl).
While some might see Perl's notion of types ($, @, %) as an impediment, I see it as expressiveness - which helps me.
While some see Python's "do as I say" approach to syntax as allowing complete cleanliness throughout programs, I see it as restrictive and Java-ish.
Eventually, every programming language sucks (as you can see in YourLanguageSucks). I reckon it is simply key to respect the other programmers and their chosen language while preferring yours.
P.S.: PHP doesn't count. :)
SawyerX, your presentation was excellent! Thank you!
As we split up and I walked towards the train with the two Python programmers whom I actually quite appreciate, they started to discuss which version of Python each one of them is using. I don't recall the exact numbers, but I remember 2 something. Maybe they were 2.6 and 2.6.1? Certainly not 3. One of them said he does not want to upgrade because that will break some of his code.
That got my attention too as we had a lot of backward compatibility discussions in the Perl world and asked what version problems are there in Python?
The immediate reaction was that there are no version problems in Python. (that would not fit in the picture of perfect language would it?)
After we agreed that they just mentioned some issues we drifted into some discussion on some backward compatibility issues in Perl. Apparently we were all much more comfortable discussing those.
In the end it left me baffled.
Might there be tiny bit of backward compatibility issues in Python?
Thanks, first of all. :)
Regarding Python and backwards compatibility. It is strange, how on one hand it seems like a perfect language but when Python 3 came out, one of the main points they stressed was that it will backwards incompatible. So now whoever has stuff written in Python 2 can't upgrade to 3 without upgrading the code. Whoever wants to start using 3 has to be use it on machines that don't have 2 code, unless they maintain a dual-life binaries - which most of us think is a bit risky - to say the least.
Do you remember what I said about why I think Perl doesn't get upgraded in a lot of places? I believe we'll start seeing it happen with Python 3. If they would hit a few more incompatibilities with 4 or 5, they'll end up in the Perl 5.6 vs. Perl 5.8 world. :)
Thanks for your reply. I do most of my programming (aircraft engine simulation for cockpit simulators) in Fortran. Nice to know it's not mentioned at all on yourlanguagesucks. :-)