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The debunking of the myth of unreadability omitted something of concern to me: How much Perl code "in the wild" uses those best practices? I have no doubt tha
by bkovitz 17y ago
The debunking of the myth of unreadability omitted something of concern to me: How much Perl code "in the wild" uses those best practices?
I have no doubt that Perl can be written in a disciplined and reasonable manner, readable to people familiar with its idioms, and not especially bug-prone. I cringe every time I come across Perl code because I've never actually come across any real Perl that's written that way. Or maybe I have, but I've always gotten discouraged with the language before mastering enough of the syntax to master the idioms, so I can't really tell.
This is not a problem with Python. It's easy to learn to read Python, and I have yet to come across really bad Python in practice. Good coding seems to flow easily from the way the language is made.
- chromatic 17y ago> How much Perl code "in the wild" uses those best practices? Not enough. Consider this, though: how much Perl code "in the wild" is the result of programming novices who learned just enough Perl to do a job without actually having to learn how to program or how to write Perl code well or how to write maintainable code? I suspect that it's far more than you might think. If that's true, then the complaint is that Perl is too easy to write.