4 ms·

Ok i'll play. The reason is because it's unreadable. Yeah i'm sure you can write your perl program with ease and it can do all kinds of magical things. I believ

Ok i'll play. The reason is because it's unreadable. Yeah i'm sure you can write your perl program with ease and it can do all kinds of magical things. I believe you. But the problem is it's one of the worst languages when it comes to readability. I also used to write perl, especially doing natural language processing, etc. so I know pretty much what you are talking about in this department. But I would always find myself wondering what the hell i wrote 6 months ago when I used perl. That doesn't happen with other new languages I picked up along the way. So if you're just a lone coder working on your own thing that no one else will use, then no one's stopping you. Go ahead. But if you're trying to maintain a large project with many developers, perl is very inefficient.

khedoros1 10y ago
It's unreadable if you write it that way. It's a flexible language with a dozen ways to do most things, and some of those are more legible than others. I use Python for a lot of the things I used to use Perl for, and one of the biggest benefits is that it constrains your style a lot more, and things look more consistently readable.
- sagichmal 10y ago
  > It's unreadable if you write it that way. It's a flexible language with a dozen ways to do most things... Yes, these are precisely the properties that makes Perl unreadable. This permissiveness is a weakness!
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway7645 10y ago
I personally don't use Perl much, but I've seen quite a few scripts written by members of my IT department that I could read top->bottom without any issue whatsoever.
- tyingq 10y ago
  I like Perl, but I can see the argument for why it's not readable. People often mistakenly use sections of code with crazy looking regexes as an example...that's not really the issue though. To me, it's a combination of two things: - The culture that it's good to have many ways to do the same thing. - The abundance of sigils on variables ($, %, @, etc), and how that gets unmanageable once you have complex data structures. Especially once you mix in references.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  Yeah that's because it's written by people from IT department. They are supposed to write it in the most readable manner since it's their job. But like others on the thread said, the inherently extreme flexibility makes it hard to write a consistently readable code. You literally need some sort of discipline to consistently write a readable code.

khedoros1 10y ago

It's unreadable if you write it that way. It's a flexible language with a dozen ways to do most things, and some of those are more legible than others. I use Python for a lot of the things I used to use Perl for, and one of the biggest benefits is that it constrains your style a lot more, and things look more consistently readable.

sagichmal 10y ago
> It's unreadable if you write it that way. It's a flexible language with a dozen ways to do most things... Yes, these are precisely the properties that makes Perl unreadable. This permissiveness is a weakness!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

throwaway7645 10y ago

I personally don't use Perl much, but I've seen quite a few scripts written by members of my IT department that I could read top->bottom without any issue whatsoever.

tyingq 10y ago
I like Perl, but I can see the argument for why it's not readable. People often mistakenly use sections of code with crazy looking regexes as an example...that's not really the issue though. To me, it's a combination of two things: - The culture that it's good to have many ways to do the same thing. - The abundance of sigils on variables ($, %, @, etc), and how that gets unmanageable once you have complex data structures. Especially once you mix in references.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
Yeah that's because it's written by people from IT department. They are supposed to write it in the most readable manner since it's their job. But like others on the thread said, the inherently extreme flexibility makes it hard to write a consistently readable code. You literally need some sort of discipline to consistently write a readable code.