4 ms·
It's a beautiful & succinct language to write in. When you know it & it's various implicit various implicit variables, you feel enormously powerful, are able t
by rektide 4y ago
It's a beautiful & succinct language to write in.
When you know it & it's various implicit various implicit variables, you feel enormously powerful, are able to make really beautiful use of the bountiful context Perl leaves out for you. It's heady & compelling in a way almost nothing else ever has been for me.
Pass by sigil is weird but everything being named symbols is a powerfully simple concept, that opens interesting roads.
But gee it sure is nearly impossible to read after. Rebuilding the context of how everything fits together, remembering each little rule you've taken advantage of is a trying puzzle indeed.
Sidenote, it's a long far off hope (lots of the base deb tools are Perl), but I hope someday we can run a Debian system without Perl, that we end up with more mature replacements eventually. It being everywhere is the authors #1. In general they try to present practical sensible reasons. But so few are language specific concerns, are context but not really talking "Why Perl" itself, why Perl the language. The seductive heady weird ambiance of Perl is so unique, is a much less structured & clear "why".
- AndyDevine 4y agoPerl is a write-only language.
- anthk 4y agoCheck PangZero of Frozen Bubble.
- forgetfulness 4y agoPerl is meant to be written and read intuitively. Which is a bad decision, in every language you're going by intuition 95% of the time, it's when a piece of code works in an unfamiliar way that you reason from first principles, and then having clear and rigid rules to fall back on gets you out of the rut more quickly. Perl's design makes this harder for purportedly giving you more tools to write code that looks about right.
- tp34 4y agoTranslation: I am not a competent $language programmer. You will not understand my poorly written code. In this case, language="perl". perl is not special in this regard.
- rektide 4y agoI believe the longstanding joke goes, 'Perl is a Worn language, write once read never'