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My experiences conflict with your first and third points (especially if you add Ruby, Java, and C++). Your second point has a lot of truth to it, though I wond

My experiences conflict with your first and third points (especially if you add Ruby, Java, and C++). Your second point has a lot of truth to it, though I wonder why it's not true of spaghetti PHP. A language that's incredibly easy to deploy and incredibly easy to begin and easiest to embed in HTML doesn't lend itself to creating huge amounts of well-structured, well-factored, easily maintained code.

jacquesm 17y ago
I think as the author of the piece writes that the 'there is more than one way to do it' has something to do with that. As for the first and third points, they were about perl, not about Ruby, Java and C++. Sure, there are other languages where you see the same kind of behaviour, but the 'perl' gurus that I've had the non-pleasure of working with over the past couple of years were without exception detrimental to my view of perl. I know it shouldn't matter but if every guy you run in to that tries to ram a certain language down your throat is basically viewing their code as a means to achieve job security then that doesn't really help. As we're speaking I'm still busy disentangling some perl one of these guys wrote, it's the biggest mess you've ever seen. Perl certainly gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself with. In perl you not only have to contend many times with ugly code, on top of that it might be written in a way that is completely alien from the way you would write it.
- chromatic 17y ago
  > In perl you not only have to contend many times with ugly code, on top of that it might be written in a way that is completely alien from the way you would write it. After seeing code which used files on disk because the author either didn't understand or trust arrays, I've come to the conclusion that code not designed and written and tested specifically with maintainability in mind will quickly become a big ball of mud, independent of language. Perhaps certain languages offer syntactic tricks for obfuscation and cleverness in the small, but the mindset that prefers cleverness over maintainability will always be able to perpetuate great evils throughout a codebase.

jacquesm 17y ago

I think as the author of the piece writes that the 'there is more than one way to do it' has something to do with that. As for the first and third points, they were about perl, not about Ruby, Java and C++. Sure, there are other languages where you see the same kind of behaviour, but the 'perl' gurus that I've had the non-pleasure of working with over the past couple of years were without exception detrimental to my view of perl. I know it shouldn't matter but if every guy you run in to that tries to ram a certain language down your throat is basically viewing their code as a means to achieve job security then that doesn't really help. As we're speaking I'm still busy disentangling some perl one of these guys wrote, it's the biggest mess you've ever seen. Perl certainly gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself with. In perl you not only have to contend many times with ugly code, on top of that it might be written in a way that is completely alien from the way you would write it.

chromatic 17y ago
> In perl you not only have to contend many times with ugly code, on top of that it might be written in a way that is completely alien from the way you would write it. After seeing code which used files on disk because the author either didn't understand or trust arrays, I've come to the conclusion that code not designed and written and tested specifically with maintainability in mind will quickly become a big ball of mud, independent of language. Perhaps certain languages offer syntactic tricks for obfuscation and cleverness in the small, but the mindset that prefers cleverness over maintainability will always be able to perpetuate great evils throughout a codebase.