Re: perl

[prev] [thread] [next] [lurker] [Date index for 2006/12/21]

From: Chris Nandor
Subject: Re: perl
Date: 17:40 on 21 Dec 2006
At 17:24 +0000 2006.12.21, David Cantrell wrote:
>On Sun, Dec 17, 2006 at 09:36:52PM -0800, Aaron J. Grier wrote:
>
>> this is exactly what I hate about perl.  "there's more than one way to
>> do it" invariably means that some dumbfucks out there will attempt to do
>> it every single way possible in the language.  perl apparently prides
>> itself on this.
>
>A general purpose language which can't be used in different ways to
>solve different problems is not fit for purpose.  Are you proposing that
>programming languages should be rigid and unsuitable for a wide range of
>tasks?

My biggest problem with people who complain about Perl like this is that
they almost invariably have never spent much practical time working with
Perl.  I use Perl all the time, every day, and have for years.  And I
almost never run into code written by "dumbfucks" (excepting myself, of
course).  The code I work with on a daily basis is just ... code.

And me and my coworkers, while we are occasionally bitten by the crazy dark
corners of Perl, are more often saved time and headaches by Perl's
exceptional flexibility and capability.  To the extent the codebase is a
tangled mass that is hard for people to understand, it's almost entirely
irrespective of the language chosen to write it in (the few places we do
weird Perl-things, we leave a comment to say what's going on, and it's all
good).

I know YMMV, especially if you're a sysadmin, as many people here are.
Sysadmins often have to deal with bad scripts written by other people, and
Perl scripts can be some of the worst of them.  But that is such a tiny
portion of the use of Perl.

-- 
Chris Nandor                      pudge@xxxxx.xxx    http://pudge.net/
Open Source Technology Group       pudge@xxxx.xxx     http://ostg.com/
There's stuff above here

Generated at 22:02 on 27 Dec 2006 by mariachi 0.52