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If I was ever to be religious, I would believe that PHP was the work of the devil. It's just so... uuuugh. It doesn't make sense. Did you know that you can incr

If I was ever to be religious, I would believe that PHP was the work of the devil. It's just so... uuuugh. It doesn't make sense. Did you know that you can increment a string in PHP? Yup. Of course you can't decrement it, that's crazy talk. Anyway, I usually avoid perl. While definitely a true programming language, I really don't like it. I find that it lacks clarity, and quickly collapses into bash-like hackery. I personally use Python when it's a notch above shell, but not enough to pull out the big guns. (I use to write a lot of perl when I was a kid, even made an accounting system in it, so my dislike of perl is from experience. We also had a 6000 line perl build script at my current job which was the last drop. Rewrote it to 40 lines of batch and 150 lines of Python. Likewise, I also wrote a lot of PHP, and can no longer consider it a proper programming language.)

gbacon 9y ago
It sounds like the original build script was poorly written. Bad (or hurried) programmers write bad code no matter the language. Are you claiming that its size was because Perl forced it to be long winded?
- arghwhat 9y ago
  My dislike of Perl comes from personal experience in using it. I don't think one can have valid strong opinions of a language without having used extensively. I feel like some programming languages, no matter the structure of the application, feels unstructured and write-only in nature. To me, Perl is one of such languages. Python has a similar effect, but I feel like it is more controllable as long as the project is kept within a sensible length. So while that abomination was primarily the fault of the designer, I do think that Perl invites this behavior one way or another. (I gave up entirely on reading that disaster of a build script, and instead instrumented system() so that I could trace the calls to various tools and infer the logic myself.)

gbacon 9y ago

It sounds like the original build script was poorly written. Bad (or hurried) programmers write bad code no matter the language. Are you claiming that its size was because Perl forced it to be long winded?

arghwhat 9y ago
My dislike of Perl comes from personal experience in using it. I don't think one can have valid strong opinions of a language without having used extensively. I feel like some programming languages, no matter the structure of the application, feels unstructured and write-only in nature. To me, Perl is one of such languages. Python has a similar effect, but I feel like it is more controllable as long as the project is kept within a sensible length. So while that abomination was primarily the fault of the designer, I do think that Perl invites this behavior one way or another. (I gave up entirely on reading that disaster of a build script, and instead instrumented system() so that I could trace the calls to various tools and infer the logic myself.)