Re: Perl

[prev] [thread] [next] [lurker] [Date index for 2004/02/25]

From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: Perl
Date: 13:30 on 25 Feb 2004
> What's wrong in Perl? It lets one easely develope ugly code?

It encourages one to develop ugly code, and makes it almost impossible
to develop anything else. I have yet to see any Perl code that I
would consider elegant or clever, let alone straightforward and
maintainable.  I would rather maintain Fortran that had been
mechanically translated from COBOL by an undergrad's Visual Basic
program than any of the gems of Perl I've ever found littering the
Internet.

Larry Wall designed a language that has the illusion of the rambling
accidental incongruities of English, without any of the charm and
flexibility of that mongrel language. It's complex, convoluted,
and superficially casual, but when you come right down to it
there isn't really "more than one way to do it", there's simply
many ways to write the one true way.

There are languages that really do have the flexibility and
expressiveness claimed for Perl, but they do so not because of a
baroque syntax but because they put syntax in the hand of the
programmer rather than guiding his hand from afar.  Lisp, Forth,
Smalltalk, APL, and the many languages derived from them. Languages
you can weird, where you can say "There's glory for you" without
finding that the Academie Francais has changed the syntax for
"glory" in the next edition and all your clever little puns have
become one with the snows of yesteryear. Except that you can't
write "yesteryear" because Larry Wall didn't think of making that
one of his rigidly constrained areas of doubt and uncertainty.

Perl is like a Victorian grammarian wandering into a room where
Edward Lear and Duke Ellington are having a grand old time combining
"The Miller's Tale" and "Jabberwocky" with impromptu jazz, and
declaring that he's had the really ripping idea of putting the "if"
at the end of the sentence... quite unaware that the ensuing uproar
is laughing-at, not laughing-with.

Oh, if only Larry Wall were Finnish, so he would have been inspired
by a language that had actual syntax. He might then have understood
where syntax was a foundation and where it was a crutch. Instead he
treated it as a plaything and ensnared every programmer following
in a cage as complex as a sonnet or limerick... producing one
digital McGonagall after another who manages to cram blank verse
into the form of a clerihew and imagines this to be liberating.

There's stuff above here

Generated at 14:02 on 01 Jul 2004 by mariachi 0.52