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Re: sensible languages for younger contributors (was Re: lintian.debian.org off ?)



On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 12:00:47PM +0200, Serafeim (Serafi) Zanikolas wrote:
> hi Jonathan,
> 
> On Sun Sep 22, 2024 at 5:05 PM CEST, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> > On Wed Sep 4, 2024 at 8:33 PM BST, Serafeim (Serafi) Zanikolas wrote:
> > > incidentally, lots of Debian native code is in perl, and like it or
> > > not, we should allow for, or even encourage [0] (partial) rewrites if
> > > we want to attract new contributors, especially below the average DD
> > > age
[snip]
> > What criteria are important for such a recommendation?
> 
> I'm not sure that we could converge on a recommendation, nor that it would be of
> any use if we were to -- except perhaps in a team-local scope. fwiw, some ideas:
> 
> - popularity, accounting for fitness for purpose (e.g. no php and js, as
>   mentioned elsewhere in this thread)
> - readability
> - maintainability
> 
> as an example, I've rewritten adequate(1) from perl to go. the perl version was
> absolutely fine, I just couldn't see myself writing perl for fun in my free
> time. and I feel more optimistic about finding co/new maintainers given that
> it's in go

In my personal experience, languages that either have built-in strong type
checking or have easy ways (and IMHO mypy invoked via Tox is easy) to run
a type checker lead to much more maintainable code over time, at the obvious
price of a bit more verbosity.

> > (Please, not Python :P)
> 
> not a big fan either, but python scores pretty high in terms of the first two
> criteria above

...so lately I have found that I never write new stuff in C and Perl,
preferring Rust and Python respectively.
(and yes, I know Raku has strong typing, and I do use it for some local
projects, but unfortunately I don't think it will ever gain the popularity
it deserves)

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
Peter Pentchev  roam@ringlet.net roam@debian.org peter@morpheusly.com
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