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Ann Barcomb wrote:
> This wasn't very hate-filled, since you admit it isn't the fault of the
> language. This belongs on the 'I hate people' forum.
>
> Come on, you can do better!
Even if he can't, I sure as hell can.
I hate Perl. I used to vaguely like it, because it felt liberating
after working in COBOL and Modula-2, and it's easier to write human-
readable code for it than /bin/sh once you get past really simple
things.
But the moment you try to anything properly, try to modularize and,
you know, do perverted things like *reusing code*, it becomes a pain
in the arse. One exciting feature I came across recently is that
under certain circumstances you can create what seems like a module
which exports a bunch of names, but if you don't start the name with
an upper-case character it only exports the first. And it won't
*tell* you this is what is going on (even with -w and use strict),
it just whines that it can't find &main::foo() when it's supposed
to be getting &thing::foo().
Don't even get me started on the flatten-all-arguments-into-
a-list-of-scalars bullshit. Or the lack of any decent support
in the basic language for datastructures other than lists.
I'm sorry, walking through an array of arrays of hashrefs
is not a substitute for a record/struct datatype, and having
to fight it's alleged OO model to use a third-party "class"
do what would be a simple job in anything else is completely
not acceptable to me.
Now I feel dirty every time I have to do anything more complicated
than:
open(FILE,"<somefile");
while(<FILE>){
# do some stuff to the line
}
close(FILE);
in Perl. It makes me want to scratch my eye out. And I have this
problem every time I have to write any code, because we're a Perl
shop. Entirely due to inertia -- most of us recognise that it's a
shitty language for real work, but it's the lingua franca of the
UNIX-geek world so we're pretty much stuck with it.
Hell, I hate Perl so much I'm willing to overlook the significant-
whitespace problem in Python.
Matt
--
"Stuff existentialism, I'm goin' back to momma"
-- TISM
There's stuff above here
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