The Problems of Perl: The Future of Bugzilla

[Nick Barnes]

At 2007-05-12 10:08:02+0000, "Aaron Trevena" writes:

> IME that isn't true. Mitigating for Python's poor error reporting,
> Ruby's poor performance and or reinventing wheels in Ruby are costly.

A number of people have mentioned the quality of error reporting as a
strike against Python.  Can any of these people provide a concrete
example of what they are talking about?  With source code, and a
misleading or confusing error message?

I've never had any problem understanding or using Python error
messages.  They're much like Perl errors: you get an error message, a
code location, and a backtrace.  Sometimes one wants a little more
information in order to make a full diagnosis, so for one Python
project I wrote a tiny utility to get backtraces with local variable
values, which I can then print out and put in the application log
file:

<http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/p4dti/master/code/replicator/stacktrace.py>

The fact that I develop most of my Python with a command line to hand,
in which I can type pdb.pm() at any point to grovel around the code
and data with the debugger, makes Python errors very much easier for
me to deal with than Perl ones.  I dare say there are command line
tools analogous to this, built in to Perl, but I've never found them.

Nick B