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In one of the WWDC sessions an Apple engineer was adamant one should never choose terseness over clarity, because every line of code is written once by one pers
by mantrax5 12y ago
In one of the WWDC sessions an Apple engineer was adamant one should never choose terseness over clarity, because every line of code is written once by one person, but read many times by many people.
And funny enough Objective-C is taking this quite seriously, being a very verbose language (the new Swift language also keep the verbose method names, enums and properties).
While Perl is exactly the opposite. There's a reason people jokingly call it a write-only language.
It has real implication on its usage. You use Perl for one-off scripts you intend to forget and maybe delete after you run them a few times.
While CPAN happened, I wonder how much Perl was an obstacle in multiple people joining to work on a single library (versus multiple people just downloading it and using it, big difference).
- mst 12y agoMost of the modern perl ecosystem is libraries built by substantial teams - it's a lot different now than a decade or so ago. The Modern Perl dialect is basically what came out of the new wave of CPAN (Enlightened Perl) movement which is all about using perl's flexibility in a way that scales to larger teams. Sadly, every attempt to explain this to people not already writing it results in a deluge of 'write-only' jokes and nobody bothering to actually look at the code, so while the technical capacity is there, the pop culture nature of programming language choice means people generally never realise.
- mantrax5 12y agoPerl's brand is damaged. No amount of explaining fixes a broken brand. The best that can probably be done is to create a new language which is, say, a clean subset of Perl 6 and call it something new, focusing the message on how readable and intuitive it is.