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I don't think that is why with Perl. Granted it's been over a decade so opinion might have changed but when I was in college Perl had a reputation as being a "w
by throwaway2016a 9y ago
I don't think that is why with Perl. Granted it's been over a decade so opinion might have changed but when I was in college Perl had a reputation as being a "write only" language. Where unless you had comments / documentation to explain it to you, if you encounter code you didn't write (or you wrote 6 months ago) good luck figuring out what it does.
All languages are like that to a certain extent but Perl more than others.
Edit: fixed "read only" to "write only"
- laylomo2 9y agoWouldn't that make perl a "write-only" language?
- throwaway2016a 9y agoYes. Thank you. I didn't proof read my post and made a mistake. I meant to say "write only"... the original has been edited. Thanks again!
- tooltalk 9y agoYou mean "write-only" language? I had a lot of junior folks complaining about "un"readability of my Perl codes back when I used to work in finance. There were a lot of seasoned Java and C++ programmer on the business side who didn't have much problem hacking their way around Perl, but most folks on the operational side had less than a few year of shell, Python, PHP. I ended up rewriting their codes for speed, brevity and correctness -- and it drove them crazy. But I've also seen a fair share of properly functioning, yet incomprehensible Perl codes so I could see why so many are turned off.
- davidcbc 9y agoPerl definitely can be "write only", but it doesn't have to be as long as you don't try to be too clever, but I could say the same about most languages. I wouldn't want to work on a stack that was centered around Perl, but it is fantastic for quick one off scripts or relatively simple file processing tasks