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Like most programming languages Perl is fine, but there are things in it that could be better. Yes you can make a mess in it, but you can do that in any langua

Like most programming languages Perl is fine, but there are things in it that could be better. Yes you can make a mess in it, but you can do that in any language. P.S. Why did you write a blogging system in a language you obviously hate? :D

nox101 2y ago
I didn't know better when I started (~97) and enjoyed perl for ~5 yrs before I learned better. Perl is designed to make obfuscated code. Sure, you can try to write non-obfuscated perl but that's fighting the language. Clearly, all its magic variables were meant to be used, else they wouldn't exist. It's also got it's crazy hacked variables with "local" etc.... Sure, you can get things done in any language. Brainfuck FTW? But some languages are just poorly designed. They're not designed to make maintainable readable code and avoid bugs, they're designed so its easy to do the wrong things, make mistakes, make things hard to read, and to have errors etc. Both Perl and Bash have these traits. No language is perfect but many other languages have far less of these issues.
- scrapheap 2y ago
  I have a better understanding on where you're coming from now, with your main experience of Perl being later version 4 and early version 5 of the language - things have significantly improved since then and it's a lot easier to write Perl code that's both easy to read and maintain these days. You might want to have a look through the Modern Perl book (http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/index.html http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/index.html) to get an idea of the direction the language has moved. And for the more junior programmers out there: Just because a language gives you a feature doesn't mean you have to use it - part of being a good programmer is understanding when it makes sense to use a language's feature and when it doesn't. After all, C let's us directly inline machine code as an array of bytes, but that doesn't mean that we should be using that feature every time we write C code :)

nox101 2y ago

I didn't know better when I started (~97) and enjoyed perl for ~5 yrs before I learned better. Perl is designed to make obfuscated code. Sure, you can try to write non-obfuscated perl but that's fighting the language. Clearly, all its magic variables were meant to be used, else they wouldn't exist. It's also got it's crazy hacked variables with "local" etc.... Sure, you can get things done in any language. Brainfuck FTW? But some languages are just poorly designed. They're not designed to make maintainable readable code and avoid bugs, they're designed so its easy to do the wrong things, make mistakes, make things hard to read, and to have errors etc. Both Perl and Bash have these traits. No language is perfect but many other languages have far less of these issues.

scrapheap 2y ago
I have a better understanding on where you're coming from now, with your main experience of Perl being later version 4 and early version 5 of the language - things have significantly improved since then and it's a lot easier to write Perl code that's both easy to read and maintain these days. You might want to have a look through the Modern Perl book (http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/index.html http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/index.html) to get an idea of the direction the language has moved. And for the more junior programmers out there: Just because a language gives you a feature doesn't mean you have to use it - part of being a good programmer is understanding when it makes sense to use a language's feature and when it doesn't. After all, C let's us directly inline machine code as an array of bytes, but that doesn't mean that we should be using that feature every time we write C code :)