3 ms·

The fact that Perl is so unfashionable and yet still far more prevalent than the trendy Ruby and Python (which are also good languages - I am no partisan) shoul

The fact that Perl is so unfashionable and yet still far more prevalent than the trendy Ruby and Python (which are also good languages - I am no partisan) should tell you that it is not a bad language. I does however enable bad programming in a way that other languages do not.

amichail 17y ago
So creationism is not a bad theory because many people believe it?
- lil_cain 17y ago
  No. Creationism is a bad theory because it is inherently unprovable either way, and because people have provided evidence for the alternatives. If you want to provide evidence that 'perl is a bad language' feel free. Of course, you'll be handicapped by the fact that there is no really widely accepted definition of a good or bad language, but you should at least be able to argue it one way or the other. You just seem to continually asserting that it's bad, hoping that it'll prove your point.
jrockway 17y ago
It does however enable bad programming in a way that other languages do not. This is wrong -- read StackOverflow some time, and you will find that people write horribly, horribly bad code in Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, C#, Haskell, ... anything. Bad programmers enable bad programming. The best a language can do is to make sure that the bad code is indented consistently. (Have you read 1984? Replacing negative words with positive words does not make the world a positive place.)
- jonathansizz 17y ago
  I didn't say it's not possible to write bad code in other languages. I was refering to 'there's more than one way to do it', which allows more freedom to screw up. I think there's a reason that Perl is still the number one scripting language, and it's good to see that development on it is still progressing.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    There is more than one way to do it in any language.
uninverted 17y ago
java cobol c++ fortran basic pascal php

amichail 17y ago

So creationism is not a bad theory because many people believe it?

lil_cain 17y ago
No. Creationism is a bad theory because it is inherently unprovable either way, and because people have provided evidence for the alternatives. If you want to provide evidence that 'perl is a bad language' feel free. Of course, you'll be handicapped by the fact that there is no really widely accepted definition of a good or bad language, but you should at least be able to argue it one way or the other. You just seem to continually asserting that it's bad, hoping that it'll prove your point.

jrockway 17y ago

It does however enable bad programming in a way that other languages do not. This is wrong -- read StackOverflow some time, and you will find that people write horribly, horribly bad code in Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, C#, Haskell, ... anything. Bad programmers enable bad programming. The best a language can do is to make sure that the bad code is indented consistently. (Have you read 1984? Replacing negative words with positive words does not make the world a positive place.)

jonathansizz 17y ago
I didn't say it's not possible to write bad code in other languages. I was refering to 'there's more than one way to do it', which allows more freedom to screw up. I think there's a reason that Perl is still the number one scripting language, and it's good to see that development on it is still progressing.
- jrockway 17y ago
  There is more than one way to do it in any language.

uninverted 17y ago

java cobol c++ fortran basic pascal php