4 ms·
Ok you jest. Pretty sure there's a transcription error there. "Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/
by harry8 9y ago
Ok you jest. Pretty sure there's a transcription error there.
"Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible."
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Larry_Wall https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Larry_Wall at the bottom of the page. Anyone passingly familiar with Perl has probably encountered it as a guiding principle of the language design.
If perl 5 had use strict; and -w enabled by default maybe the write only line noise crud would be less prevalent and we'd still be using perl rather than python? It's not actually that hard to write readable, clean perl. Python's signficant whitespace seemed like such a rubbish idea at first but wow, how much easier is it to read code written by inexperienced hackers when there is no choice in formatting. That strength dominating the lack of default strict and warnings, (maybe oo bolted on syntax too?) in perl probably won the day for python because after a decade of writing python it still feels like a step down from perl and I miss it some, although not as bitterly as all these lispers seem to miss lisp ;-)
- jrumbut 9y agoHaving loved getting to write some Perl 5 here and there I think I know how to write object oriented Perl, but I still have no idea why it needs to be so different from the way you would expect it to work (besides political reasons or for it to feel different than other OO languages). Modern Javascript owes an enormous philosophical debt to perl and Larry Wall, who pioneered the whole "take some nice parts from Lisp but leave the parens" approach to language design. I'm hopeful that the wonderful ideas from Perl 6 will be adopted into a language people use sooner rather than later. I guess that language could be Perl 6 but I'm doubtful.
- harry8 9y agoMy understanding is that OO wasn't so much designed into perl 5 as bolted on later with a pretty cool and useful hack. This makes writing your first few perl objects a bit awkward. "Bless an array, why? What's that got to do with what I want?" There's better library support that came in after I'd stopped writing much perl, but looks quite clean by comparison. Too late for me, sadly. Still python isn't so bad when you need to script something your colleagues might need to read. It could have been different though and I would have preferred a more Perl flavoured world. Maybe it will come again..? http://search.cpan.org/dist/Moose/lib/Moose/Manual.pod http://search.cpan.org/dist/Moose/lib/Moose/Manual.pod
- thomascgalvin 9y ago> It's not actually that hard to write readable, clean perl. The real issue is that it's trivially easy to write very clever, perfectly functional, and completely unreadable Perl. A lot of Java's verbosity is due to the fact that inexperienced developers need to have their hand slapped by the compiler pretty frequently. "No, stop, what was it you really meant to do there?" Of course now with Kotlin and Go we're swinging back the other way.