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I studied natural language processing so have used perl a lot in the past. I kind of drifted away since then, but remember that it made me feel cool when I was
by galistoca 11y ago
I studied natural language processing so have used perl a lot in the past. I kind of drifted away since then, but remember that it made me feel cool when I was writing a perl code, but made me feel stupid when reading one--even the ones I wrote--kind of like how regular expression is easy to write but hard to interpret. I think a language needs to be both easy to express and easy to comprehend in order to gain adoption and that's what I was trying to say.
- Mithaldu 11y agoIf reading regexes you wrote is a pain point for you, then you're not making as much use of the readability tools Perl provides as you could, i.e. the /x modifier to make unescaped whitespace insignificant, and in-regex comments. ( http://www.perl.com/pub/2004/01/16/regexps.html http://www.perl.com/pub/2004/01/16/regexps.html ) And well, honestly, more often than not i found that "hard to read" perl code would be just as hard to read if it was written in lisp, python, c, or any other language you care to name; since more often than not that code is hard to read due to variables and functions having names that don't help the reader understand what they're holding or doing, and long blocks of code not having been encapsulated into functions well enough. And lastly, to tie in to dang's point: Having "used Perl a lot" does not mean much if you have not also "learned Perl a lot". I've known, in the extreme, a Perl dev of 10 years experience, who had started out as a C dev, and yet did not use or trust Perl hashes, instead opting to write his own data structure encoding format. Have you ever read chromatic's Modern Perl?