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Have you ever maintained some else's poorly written Perl code? I have. Rational or not, I hate Perl. And yes you can write crappy code in any language, but P
by don_draper 14y ago
Have you ever maintained some else's poorly written Perl code? I have. Rational or not, I hate Perl.
And yes you can write crappy code in any language, but Perl is just asking for a bad programmer to write bad code.
- 3amOpsGuy 14y agoIt's one of those never ending tradeoffs. The premise of the parent comment strikes a chord with me. We necessarily can't do terse and readable. To be terse enough we need to encode. Encode is just another way to say obfuscate, in this context anyway. I wouldn't necessarily agree Perl asks for a programmer to write bad code (saying this as someone who left Perl because he was fed up with write-only code). I'd phrase it as Perl readily facilitates bad code.
- kamaal 14y agoI have maintained Perl code. I don't what you mean by the term 'poorly written Perl code'. I have maintained more horrible code in languages like Java than in Perl. >>but Perl is just asking for a bad programmer to write bad code. And what is that wand that other programming languages have, that when cast with a spell magically transform a bad programmer into a Dennis Ritchie?
- js2 14y agoIt's just that Perl's power/expressiveness and TMTOWTDI mindset tend toward harder to _read_ code. You can write awful hard-to-understand code in any language, but in those other languages the reading part is usually easier. Except for maybe C++. :-)