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Downvotes are not informative. Do people really disagree that huge, non-OO scripts were the dominant style back in the 1990's? Or that people tried to solve p

Downvotes are not informative. Do people really disagree that huge, non-OO scripts were the dominant style back in the 1990's? Or that people tried to solve problems with huge data structures instead of classes? And that these practices gave Perl a less than stellar reputation? Or is it that people don't realize that Perl apps are virtually always written in clean, well-factored OO these days?

masterzora 15y ago
I was not one of the downvoters, but I was not surprised to see the downvotes. I can't figure out in what way that comment added to the discussion. "I am assuming he was Doing It Wrong" with no additional commentary on what this affects or the implications therein. Regardless of the truth of the comment, it just doesn't seem to be a very useful one.
- rjbond3rd 15y ago
  Hi masterzora, Thank you for clarifying. I appreciate it. No, not doing it wrong -- he was almost certainly doing it in the predominant style of the language in the 1990's, which was procedural / scripty, e.g., hashes of references to arrays of references etc. Pre-OO. And his remarks are certainly fair for the time period, but isn't it also fair to note that this style of coding is not practiced anymore? I think so but I'm interested in any viewpoint.
  - masterzora 15y ago
    Sure, it is fair to note, and I think it's actually a pretty good point now that you've clarified it a bit. (I speak as someone who's currently using Python at work but Perl for my own things.) However, it's a manner of how you present the comment. As you originally stated it, it pretty much sounded like "He's Doing It Wrong", which didn't add very much to the discussion. In my opinion, a much better way to go about it would have been something closer to "I think it's worth contextualising his comments. It is likely that the style in which was coding was more in line with earlier styles that are not used as often in 2011. While Perl is obviously still Perl, more recent styles do help alleviate some of his concerns." Now, this clearly still isn't a perfect comment, but it, or something more like it, would serve both to clarify your position and to allow for discussion based on it, if people were up for such discussions. But, again, I feel the need to reiterate that I was not one of the people who downvoted you, so I'm only guessing as to the most likely reason for the downvotes.
    - rjbond3rd 15y ago
      Aha, okay I totally get that. Thank you.
famousactress 15y ago
My guess is that it just came off as unnecessarily (and unproductively) defensive, as it amounts to the argument that it's not impossible to write clean applications in Perl. Perl's problem has never been that it's impossible to write 'clean, well-factored' programs.
- rjbond3rd 15y ago
  Thank you! I appreciate that you took the time to explain. ESR is apparently saying (true at the time) that Perl can be hard to maintain. But by "Perl," I speculate that he was talking about coding in monolithic non-OO scripts which would be a drag in any language. So his criticism of the language was fair in the 1990's, but only for that style of procedural coding. I tried to look at his source, but his own links to his Perl stuff are broken: http://www.catb.org/~esr/intercal/software.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/intercal/software.html
  - famousactress 15y ago
    So, yeah.. you can write hard-to-maintain code in any language, but I think many (including myself) would argue that it's much easier to do in Perl than many other languages. It's built into Perl ('more-than-one-way'), and explicitly avoided in python wherever possible. Bottom line: all things being equal, I'd argue you're more likely to end up with a Python codebase that's a pleasure to maintain than a Perl one.
    - rjbond3rd 15y ago
      That is certainly a fair opinion, although sometimes conventional wisdom is wrong :)
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technomancy 15y ago
> Do people really disagree that huge, non-OO scripts were the dominant style back in the 1990's? I don't know python, but "OO changed all that" implies that data-centric approaches are somehow passé, to which I'd reply "yeah, but FP changed all that". Maybe they are in Python though.
- rjbond3rd 15y ago
  I meant only to say that gigantic (untestable) scripts are passé at least for the language in question.

masterzora 15y ago

I was not one of the downvoters, but I was not surprised to see the downvotes. I can't figure out in what way that comment added to the discussion. "I am assuming he was Doing It Wrong" with no additional commentary on what this affects or the implications therein. Regardless of the truth of the comment, it just doesn't seem to be a very useful one.

rjbond3rd 15y ago
Hi masterzora, Thank you for clarifying. I appreciate it. No, not doing it wrong -- he was almost certainly doing it in the predominant style of the language in the 1990's, which was procedural / scripty, e.g., hashes of references to arrays of references etc. Pre-OO. And his remarks are certainly fair for the time period, but isn't it also fair to note that this style of coding is not practiced anymore? I think so but I'm interested in any viewpoint.
- masterzora 15y ago
  Sure, it is fair to note, and I think it's actually a pretty good point now that you've clarified it a bit. (I speak as someone who's currently using Python at work but Perl for my own things.) However, it's a manner of how you present the comment. As you originally stated it, it pretty much sounded like "He's Doing It Wrong", which didn't add very much to the discussion. In my opinion, a much better way to go about it would have been something closer to "I think it's worth contextualising his comments. It is likely that the style in which was coding was more in line with earlier styles that are not used as often in 2011. While Perl is obviously still Perl, more recent styles do help alleviate some of his concerns." Now, this clearly still isn't a perfect comment, but it, or something more like it, would serve both to clarify your position and to allow for discussion based on it, if people were up for such discussions. But, again, I feel the need to reiterate that I was not one of the people who downvoted you, so I'm only guessing as to the most likely reason for the downvotes.
  - rjbond3rd 15y ago
    Aha, okay I totally get that. Thank you.

famousactress 15y ago

My guess is that it just came off as unnecessarily (and unproductively) defensive, as it amounts to the argument that it's not impossible to write clean applications in Perl. Perl's problem has never been that it's impossible to write 'clean, well-factored' programs.

rjbond3rd 15y ago
Thank you! I appreciate that you took the time to explain. ESR is apparently saying (true at the time) that Perl can be hard to maintain. But by "Perl," I speculate that he was talking about coding in monolithic non-OO scripts which would be a drag in any language. So his criticism of the language was fair in the 1990's, but only for that style of procedural coding. I tried to look at his source, but his own links to his Perl stuff are broken: http://www.catb.org/~esr/intercal/software.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/intercal/software.html
- famousactress 15y ago
  So, yeah.. you can write hard-to-maintain code in any language, but I think many (including myself) would argue that it's much easier to do in Perl than many other languages. It's built into Perl ('more-than-one-way'), and explicitly avoided in python wherever possible. Bottom line: all things being equal, I'd argue you're more likely to end up with a Python codebase that's a pleasure to maintain than a Perl one.
  - rjbond3rd 15y ago
    That is certainly a fair opinion, although sometimes conventional wisdom is wrong :)

deleted 15y ago

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technomancy 15y ago

> Do people really disagree that huge, non-OO scripts were the dominant style back in the 1990's? I don't know python, but "OO changed all that" implies that data-centric approaches are somehow passé, to which I'd reply "yeah, but FP changed all that". Maybe they are in Python though.

rjbond3rd 15y ago
I meant only to say that gigantic (untestable) scripts are passé at least for the language in question.