Re: Perl

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From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: Perl
Date: 17:51 on 13 Sep 2003
> Expressive quality is in the eye of the beholder, no?  This appears to be
> about as fruitful as trying to convince someone that Chagall is a great
> artist.  No thanks.

If Perl was designed as an art form like Befunge I wouldn't have
any problem with it. It's all kinds of artistic, yes.

> It was inferred, whether you intended it or not.  That's the point.  You
> are attacking things using words like "awkward" when these things are not
> awkward when used well, assuming the person looking at it knows Perl.

I'm the mad Australian on a skateboard who throws a stack of
Adventure printouts in ten different languages at you in the enhanced
Berkeley adventure. I dig programming languages, learning new
programming languages is one of the things I do for fun. I don't
dislike Perl because I don't know it, I dislike Perl because it's
a badly designed (if that word can be applied to something that's
grown so organically) languages.

The syntax is awkward, overcomplex, has too many obscure special
cases (there's to many obvious examples to list, I'll just mention
one of the obscure ones: the way scalars and collections in for
loops are treated), and the result is that you have to not just
"know Perl" you have to be a Perl language lawyer just to avoid
wandering into a dark alley and getting figuratively mugged by some
cool feature.

And, again, any reflective language, even one with as simple a
syntax as Lisp or Scheme, has more expressive quality. Let's say
I want to express a multi-way conditional. In Perl, there's no
switch, there's half a dozen alternate ways to do the same thing
but none of them actually express the operation being performed.
In any reflective language if there's no such construct you can
create one that has EXACTLY the behaviour you need. That's "expressive
quality".

In Perl, well, you can put the conditional after the statement.
That's a "cool feature".

I hate Perl, and the more I learn about it the more I hate it.

There's stuff above here

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