4 ms·

Memorizing everything is not required, there is reference documentation. Learning the language would familiarize you with the important syntax, as with any lang

by Grinnz 7y ago

Memorizing everything is not required, there is reference documentation. Learning the language would familiarize you with the important syntax, as with any language, and all languages have such oddities, they just appear in different forms.

DonHopkins 7y ago
No, all languages do not have such oddities. That's a false equivalence. And it doesn't excuse Perl's bad design or justify its intellectually bankrupt TMTOWTDI philosophy. Python's philosophy of "There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it" is diametrically opposed to TMTOWTDI, and Python's vastly more successful than Perl because it's much easier to learn, read, use and maintain. Can you name any schools teaching Perl as a first programming language, like so many teach Python? Forcing you to look punctuation up in the reference documentation is even worse than having to memorize it. Pausing from reading code to look up punctuation in the manual slows you down by orders of magnitude, and knocks you out of the flow. Random punctuation is not easily memorizable or mnemonic or searchable or indexable. You also have to have memorized the ASCII order of punctuation to index through the manual, which is different than how punctuation is arranged on the keyboard! Is a comma or underscore less than or greater than a double quote or back quote, and why should I care? How exactly do double quotes imply "LIST_SEPARATOR"? Shouldn't it be $, because comma is the standard list separator, instead of $" which looks like it could be "STRING_DELIMITER", or does $, mean something completely different? And how am I supposed to remember all that? It's totally arbitrary, annoying, and off-putting. Now tell me how Perl is any more powerful by having twice the number of ways necessary to express the every concept? Perl pointlessly has twice as many inane pieces of syntax to memorize or look up, to do the same number of things. There is no upside to that, only cost. And that's one reason Perl is dead.
- cestith 7y ago
  $, is the output field separator, which in short or English form is very rarely used. Generally people explicitly determine what they want on output with something like sprintf(), printf(), or join() rather than sending a list to print(). Just like a natural language, there's a tiny pidgin subset you can learn and use to great effect. You then learn obscure vocabulary on the rare occasion you come across it. If you have had to maintain code by people who intentionally obfuscate it, you should be at least as angry with those people as with the designers of their tools.

by Grinnz 7y ago

DonHopkins 7y ago

No, all languages do not have such oddities. That's a false equivalence. And it doesn't excuse Perl's bad design or justify its intellectually bankrupt TMTOWTDI philosophy. Python's philosophy of "There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it" is diametrically opposed to TMTOWTDI, and Python's vastly more successful than Perl because it's much easier to learn, read, use and maintain. Can you name any schools teaching Perl as a first programming language, like so many teach Python? Forcing you to look punctuation up in the reference documentation is even worse than having to memorize it. Pausing from reading code to look up punctuation in the manual slows you down by orders of magnitude, and knocks you out of the flow. Random punctuation is not easily memorizable or mnemonic or searchable or indexable. You also have to have memorized the ASCII order of punctuation to index through the manual, which is different than how punctuation is arranged on the keyboard! Is a comma or underscore less than or greater than a double quote or back quote, and why should I care? How exactly do double quotes imply "LIST_SEPARATOR"? Shouldn't it be $, because comma is the standard list separator, instead of $" which looks like it could be "STRING_DELIMITER", or does $, mean something completely different? And how am I supposed to remember all that? It's totally arbitrary, annoying, and off-putting. Now tell me how Perl is any more powerful by having twice the number of ways necessary to express the every concept? Perl pointlessly has twice as many inane pieces of syntax to memorize or look up, to do the same number of things. There is no upside to that, only cost. And that's one reason Perl is dead.

cestith 7y ago
$, is the output field separator, which in short or English form is very rarely used. Generally people explicitly determine what they want on output with something like sprintf(), printf(), or join() rather than sending a list to print(). Just like a natural language, there's a tiny pidgin subset you can learn and use to great effect. You then learn obscure vocabulary on the rare occasion you come across it. If you have had to maintain code by people who intentionally obfuscate it, you should be at least as angry with those people as with the designers of their tools.