I got into a spat with Eric Raymond the other day about some code he's written called ForgePlucker. I took a look at the source code and posted saying it looks like a total hack job by a poor programmer. Raymond replied by posting a blog entry in which he called me a poor fool and snotty kid. The problem with writing code like ForgePlucker is maintenance. It's got all sorts of little assumptions and special cases. A much better approach is to use an HTML parser than knows all about the foibles of real HTML. Here's the equivalent function written using the BeautifulSoup parser:
Add your comment
