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> it is very unrestrictive That makes collaboration hard. The freedom I have in putting my thoughts into code, uninhibited by syntax, types and conventions mak

> it is very unrestrictive That makes collaboration hard. The freedom I have in putting my thoughts into code, uninhibited by syntax, types and conventions makes it nearly impossible for others to understand and modify my work.

mikem170 4y ago
The freedom to flexibly put thoughts into code can be used to make code more readable, or less, it depends on the programmer. A significant code base in any language can turn into a hot mess The perl coding team I was on made readability our #1 priority. We didn't use tricky or out of the ordinary syntax unless it was absolutely necessary (like unusual regex, etc), and in those cases we would document what was happening with comments and maybe a reference to the appropriate man page. We had a style guide, for a consistent look and feel. We paid attention to naming and commented blocks of code, so the reader would not need to run an interpreter in their head while skimming through the code. We'd seek feedback from each other. It worked out well. We had no problems reading our code. We used the flexibility and expressiveness of perl to make our code more readable. We had the freedom to tailor the code to what we were doing, instead of the other way around.
- ggeorgovassilis 4y ago
  > The freedom to flexibly put thoughts into code can be used to make code more readable, or less, it depends on the programmer. A significant code base in any language can turn into a hot mess If one learned how to collaborate on projects which, I think, the perl language does not incentivise. (edit) > The perl coding team I was on made readability our #1 priority. I'd love to read more about that. Have you by chance documented your experience somewhere?
  - mikem170 4y ago
    > If one learned how to collaborate on projects which, I think, the perl language does not incentivise. I tend to think that things like high level documentation, organizing libraries and functions into good abstractions, comments, and naming make a bigger difference than the programming language chosen, within reason. The goal can be to make things as easy as possible for all developers as opposed to using every feature in a language. There's a bunch of developer bad habits that can make collaboration hard. The processes and standards around development seem to make a bigger difference than the choice of language. So many coders don't bother with high level documentation, comments, or decent tests, nor do they spend the time to refactor their code as they go along to clean up readability issues. So many people just don't seem to want to bother, regardless of language. Often you have to fight management for time. I've seen atrocious and unmaintainable code in many languages. > I'd love to read more about that. Have you by chance documented your experience somewhere? My experiences grew to leading a team that were automating the reporting and deployment of complex configurations on a few tens of thousands of network devices, things like routers, switches, and voip, with all kinds of functionality for reporting, auditing, deployments, dry runs, debugging, etc. Perl is well suited to parsing and manipulating complex text configurations and outputs over ssh and interfacing to other related infrastructure applications. We were able to process devices an order of magnitude faster than HPNA (java) and ansible (python). Our code was easier to read than code using these other systems, and more sustainable. We were able to handle complex projects like mpls cutovers, 802.11x and qos migrations and upgrades, etc. We'd translate complex network architecture standards to idempotent configuration management code. We also did a lot of reporting and compliance auditing. Some of it on short notice, most of it long lived. Our project scripts read like pseudo code, a mix of perl and templating. The flexibility in perl helped us focus on representing our domain space as efficiently as possible. Our customers, who might be network engineers, managers, or compliance officers, could even read their project scripts, following the business logic, in this case the network architecture standards and/or reporting/auditing specifications. Several of us were senior engineers, and there were always several junior engineers. Senior engineers tended to work on back-end library modules and more complex projects, at least getting them off the ground. Junior engineers were mostly contractors working on less complex projects. We made things easy for ourselves, tagging to-do notes by name and category in our source code. Everything was grep'able. Our processes were not in our way. Senior engineers would do code reviews, for readability, test coverage, and maintainability, usually just adding clarifying comments during a screen share and a phone call, maybe seeing a better way to arrange something, and be a second set of eyes looking for gotchas. We'd pay attention to the depth and complexity of our abstractions, try to keep user and developer documentation close to the relevant code, and have consistent naming for variables and functions. Seniors more frequently checked up on juniors. We'd discuss things as a group when need be. Customers were responsible for signing off on correct integration test outputs. I bet that well over half our bytes were comments, documentation, and tests. My email address is in my profile, if anyone is more curious.
    - ggeorgovassilis 4y ago
      Thank you
- webmaven 4y ago
  > It worked out well. We had no problems reading our code. That's not the relevant test, even for fairly large teams. More important is whether someone from another team (or more critically, a brand new hire) can read and modify the code. That said, based on what you're describing, folks from outside your team ought to get comfortable pretty quickly too .
- zaphar 4y ago
  Anything that "... depends on the programmer" is doomed to fill up with the output of a lot of programmers who were insufficiently disciplined. At some point the majority of the work becomes avoiding or working around or firewalling that output on your own projects. Telling people to just "Get Gud" at programming is a non-solution. The more I do this the more convinced I become that using a robot (compiler, linter, static-anlyzer) to enforce discipline is a good idea and the more difficult it is to escape that robot's gaze the better. Anything else is just going to cause massive pain later.
jlg23 4y ago
How you use or abuse that freedom is entirely your choice.
- runevault 4y ago
  This is true. The downside is that a couple days of not worrying about the understandability of your code can lead to a spiral that quickly gets out of control. Plus it makes expanding a dev team significantly harder since you really need people all on the same page of what readability means. Yes you can do things like coding standards, but the more free form the language the tougher such standards are. That doesn't make a language bad, but it does change when and who can get away with using it. Same as the argument that comes up every time people talk about Lisp.
  - jlg23 4y ago
    Is there any branch of engineering where "a couple days of not worrying" does not have the potential to be "lead to a spiral that quickly gets out of control"?
    - runevault 4y ago
      Languages with tooling that will yell at you if you are sloppy make it harder to get too out of hand. Part of why I've started learning rust is between the compiler and the linter I'm forced to ask if I'm being sloppy or not.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  The languages that truly let you do anything you want flexibly invariably lead to incomprehensible ivory towers. It is why managers hate Lisp, it's why Perl is joked as write-once read-never. The issue with the "DSL" is the third letter in the abbreviation: LANGUAGE. A language isn't just a specification of syntax. A language is a collective shared understanding between a sufficiently large number of people. Without that, it is a dead language. Socially in programming, programming languages need to align to real-world concepts, because that is what enables the language to be understood by new adopters. And converging on those shared meanings is hard, because designers and lingo makers can't anticipate all the variations of understanding people will have. Learning a language is hard. So every DSL I've encountered invariably forces me to be the compiler: what is this being translated into language-wise and what does it convert to. That is a big load, so your DSL better provide power and convenience to deserve it. DSLs also run headlong into NIH/creator's advantage. The people/person that make the DSL and implement it will know it FAR better than any adopter will. And documentation is always lacking. So what is blindingly obvious to the core practitioners is very much not so to the noob. You are limited by the average intelligence of the programmer at a cultural level. The lone mad scientist may produce amazing ideas, but all the groundbreaking technology happens because an army of people can be coordinated to implement something. Lisp is basically a DSL factory, and everything is done via DSL. Can Perl7 do that better than Lisp? Is that a good or bad thing? Well, it doesn't matter. Perl5 is what it is. Perl6 was a social failure. I doubt Perl7 will change anything.
papito 4y ago
Writing in code is the same as writing in your native language. You are NOT writing it for the machine - you are writing it for the others like you. You are telling a story, and yes, it's hard.
cestith 4y ago
Teams do have conventions. There's code review. There are linters and pretty printers. There's even a standard set of default linter rules in perlcritic, taken mostly from Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices. Perl has no problem from flexibility not shared by C, Common Lisp, JavaScript, Ruby, or Ada.

mikem170 4y ago

The freedom to flexibly put thoughts into code can be used to make code more readable, or less, it depends on the programmer. A significant code base in any language can turn into a hot mess The perl coding team I was on made readability our #1 priority. We didn't use tricky or out of the ordinary syntax unless it was absolutely necessary (like unusual regex, etc), and in those cases we would document what was happening with comments and maybe a reference to the appropriate man page. We had a style guide, for a consistent look and feel. We paid attention to naming and commented blocks of code, so the reader would not need to run an interpreter in their head while skimming through the code. We'd seek feedback from each other. It worked out well. We had no problems reading our code. We used the flexibility and expressiveness of perl to make our code more readable. We had the freedom to tailor the code to what we were doing, instead of the other way around.

ggeorgovassilis 4y ago
> The freedom to flexibly put thoughts into code can be used to make code more readable, or less, it depends on the programmer. A significant code base in any language can turn into a hot mess If one learned how to collaborate on projects which, I think, the perl language does not incentivise. (edit) > The perl coding team I was on made readability our #1 priority. I'd love to read more about that. Have you by chance documented your experience somewhere?
- mikem170 4y ago
  > If one learned how to collaborate on projects which, I think, the perl language does not incentivise. I tend to think that things like high level documentation, organizing libraries and functions into good abstractions, comments, and naming make a bigger difference than the programming language chosen, within reason. The goal can be to make things as easy as possible for all developers as opposed to using every feature in a language. There's a bunch of developer bad habits that can make collaboration hard. The processes and standards around development seem to make a bigger difference than the choice of language. So many coders don't bother with high level documentation, comments, or decent tests, nor do they spend the time to refactor their code as they go along to clean up readability issues. So many people just don't seem to want to bother, regardless of language. Often you have to fight management for time. I've seen atrocious and unmaintainable code in many languages. > I'd love to read more about that. Have you by chance documented your experience somewhere? My experiences grew to leading a team that were automating the reporting and deployment of complex configurations on a few tens of thousands of network devices, things like routers, switches, and voip, with all kinds of functionality for reporting, auditing, deployments, dry runs, debugging, etc. Perl is well suited to parsing and manipulating complex text configurations and outputs over ssh and interfacing to other related infrastructure applications. We were able to process devices an order of magnitude faster than HPNA (java) and ansible (python). Our code was easier to read than code using these other systems, and more sustainable. We were able to handle complex projects like mpls cutovers, 802.11x and qos migrations and upgrades, etc. We'd translate complex network architecture standards to idempotent configuration management code. We also did a lot of reporting and compliance auditing. Some of it on short notice, most of it long lived. Our project scripts read like pseudo code, a mix of perl and templating. The flexibility in perl helped us focus on representing our domain space as efficiently as possible. Our customers, who might be network engineers, managers, or compliance officers, could even read their project scripts, following the business logic, in this case the network architecture standards and/or reporting/auditing specifications. Several of us were senior engineers, and there were always several junior engineers. Senior engineers tended to work on back-end library modules and more complex projects, at least getting them off the ground. Junior engineers were mostly contractors working on less complex projects. We made things easy for ourselves, tagging to-do notes by name and category in our source code. Everything was grep'able. Our processes were not in our way. Senior engineers would do code reviews, for readability, test coverage, and maintainability, usually just adding clarifying comments during a screen share and a phone call, maybe seeing a better way to arrange something, and be a second set of eyes looking for gotchas. We'd pay attention to the depth and complexity of our abstractions, try to keep user and developer documentation close to the relevant code, and have consistent naming for variables and functions. Seniors more frequently checked up on juniors. We'd discuss things as a group when need be. Customers were responsible for signing off on correct integration test outputs. I bet that well over half our bytes were comments, documentation, and tests. My email address is in my profile, if anyone is more curious.
  - ggeorgovassilis 4y ago
    Thank you
webmaven 4y ago
> It worked out well. We had no problems reading our code. That's not the relevant test, even for fairly large teams. More important is whether someone from another team (or more critically, a brand new hire) can read and modify the code. That said, based on what you're describing, folks from outside your team ought to get comfortable pretty quickly too .
zaphar 4y ago
Anything that "... depends on the programmer" is doomed to fill up with the output of a lot of programmers who were insufficiently disciplined. At some point the majority of the work becomes avoiding or working around or firewalling that output on your own projects. Telling people to just "Get Gud" at programming is a non-solution. The more I do this the more convinced I become that using a robot (compiler, linter, static-anlyzer) to enforce discipline is a good idea and the more difficult it is to escape that robot's gaze the better. Anything else is just going to cause massive pain later.

jlg23 4y ago

How you use or abuse that freedom is entirely your choice.

runevault 4y ago
This is true. The downside is that a couple days of not worrying about the understandability of your code can lead to a spiral that quickly gets out of control. Plus it makes expanding a dev team significantly harder since you really need people all on the same page of what readability means. Yes you can do things like coding standards, but the more free form the language the tougher such standards are. That doesn't make a language bad, but it does change when and who can get away with using it. Same as the argument that comes up every time people talk about Lisp.
- jlg23 4y ago
  Is there any branch of engineering where "a couple days of not worrying" does not have the potential to be "lead to a spiral that quickly gets out of control"?
  - runevault 4y ago
    Languages with tooling that will yell at you if you are sloppy make it harder to get too out of hand. Part of why I've started learning rust is between the compiler and the linter I'm forced to ask if I'm being sloppy or not.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
The languages that truly let you do anything you want flexibly invariably lead to incomprehensible ivory towers. It is why managers hate Lisp, it's why Perl is joked as write-once read-never. The issue with the "DSL" is the third letter in the abbreviation: LANGUAGE. A language isn't just a specification of syntax. A language is a collective shared understanding between a sufficiently large number of people. Without that, it is a dead language. Socially in programming, programming languages need to align to real-world concepts, because that is what enables the language to be understood by new adopters. And converging on those shared meanings is hard, because designers and lingo makers can't anticipate all the variations of understanding people will have. Learning a language is hard. So every DSL I've encountered invariably forces me to be the compiler: what is this being translated into language-wise and what does it convert to. That is a big load, so your DSL better provide power and convenience to deserve it. DSLs also run headlong into NIH/creator's advantage. The people/person that make the DSL and implement it will know it FAR better than any adopter will. And documentation is always lacking. So what is blindingly obvious to the core practitioners is very much not so to the noob. You are limited by the average intelligence of the programmer at a cultural level. The lone mad scientist may produce amazing ideas, but all the groundbreaking technology happens because an army of people can be coordinated to implement something. Lisp is basically a DSL factory, and everything is done via DSL. Can Perl7 do that better than Lisp? Is that a good or bad thing? Well, it doesn't matter. Perl5 is what it is. Perl6 was a social failure. I doubt Perl7 will change anything.

papito 4y ago

Writing in code is the same as writing in your native language. You are NOT writing it for the machine - you are writing it for the others like you. You are telling a story, and yes, it's hard.

cestith 4y ago

Teams do have conventions. There's code review. There are linters and pretty printers. There's even a standard set of default linter rules in perlcritic, taken mostly from Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices. Perl has no problem from flexibility not shared by C, Common Lisp, JavaScript, Ruby, or Ada.