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I don't want the popularity we once had. The same people who wrote unreadable, unmaintainable perl went on to do the same sort of damage in PHP, then python, t
by mst 12y ago
I don't want the popularity we once had.
The same people who wrote unreadable, unmaintainable perl went on to do the same sort of damage in PHP, then python, then ruby/rails, and now node.js/go. They were never a net positive to the community, and I'm not sorry to see them causing problems for somebody else.
(and before somebody says "but that doesn't happen in X" ... yes, it does, even python lets you write code that looks superficially comprehensible but turns out to be so horribly illogical structurally that it's impossible to maintain - I quite like python but I've been there and I was kinda scared because at least wrong perl looks wrong to start with, whereas wrong python looks fine until you realise just how much of a crawling horror it is)
- chaostheory 12y ago> before somebody says "but that doesn't happen in X" ... yes, it does, even python lets you write code that looks superficially comprehensible but turns out to be so horribly illogical structurally that it's impossible to maintain It does happen, but due to the design of Python / Ruby / Javascript, it's a lot harder to make happen especially when you use a framework. As a former Perl dev, unless someone maintains god-like discipline over a Perl code-base; it's a lot easier to come up with unmaintainable spaghetti, that no one save for the original developer fully understands how it works, than it is in other competing languages.
- esaym 12y agoI was thinking the same thing. Didn't say anything because I didn't want to be rude to the "lets cut and paste code from google searches" coders... If someone really wants to use a language, there is no excuse for not reading a book for that language first.
- yellowapple 12y agoAnd when it comes to a "book for that language", Programming Perl really does take the cake.
- mamcx 12y agoWith python is not the same. Even if the developers is truly bad and do a mess, is a decipherable mess. Requiere truly talent to do a hard-to-understand mess in python, and in that case, is very likely the code was made by a good developer ;)
- yellowapple 12y ago> Requiere truly talent to do a hard-to-understand mess in python, and in that case, is very likely the code was made by a good developer ;) Last I checked, the whole "if it was hard for me to write, it should be hard for others to understand" was still a mockery, not a seriously-interpreted excuse. It ignores the fact that the programmer's future self will eventually need to maintain that code. The developer might have skill, but one who writes unmaintainable messes as anything other than a Perl-golf-style mental exercise probably lacks wisdom. :)
- mamcx 12y agoCould provide a example on python of non-intentional bad code, like the kind that could be write by a perl coder, that make them not understand it a week later? Because that is the issue I was talking about is rare in python. Is true that is possible to write bad in any language, but certainly is harder in some of them