[oclug] Why Perl is a Bad Language

[Francis Pinteric]

--- Kirrily Robert <skud at e-smith.com> wrote: 
> My take on this is that good programmers program well in any
> language,
> but bad programmers will program badly in any language.  If you're
> the
> sort of programmer who doesn't realise that formatting your code
> block
> all in one line is bad, then you're unlikely to have the skill or
> experience to understand algorithm design or any of the other more
> fundamental things you need to write good programs.
>

Agree 200% here. The starting point of any programme is the solution
to the problem. You may no be 100% of the way here, but you know how
to get there. Someone who hasn't a clue of how to approach the
solution to start with *may* get there in the end, but it's going to
messy.

> The thing about Perl vs $programming_language is that it's like
> every
> other holy war: essentially boring, repetitive, and unlikely to
> sway the
> opinions of anyone involved.  I tend to be moderately relaxed about
> such
> things: if you don't like Perl, that's fine, use something else

Well, I don't consider myself part of the Perl holy war. I don't
dislike Perl, per se. I think it's a bad language, coming from a
fairly cultured upbringing, aesthetics form a very large part of my
decision making. IF it's hard to make the language look good, then it
fails the "goodness" test. I suppose it's a little bit of that old
Greek saying that truth is beauty. I've written maybe about 60 Perl
programmes in my career (nothing major mind you) and have read about
(I guess) 200 more. I try to make my programmes look nice simply for
readability, maintainability and verification purposes. However, as a
*real programmer* I still comment my programmes when necessary (read
sparingly).

I remember the early days of Unix an thus C. There were indeed Holy
Wars. Unix against the world, C against the world and C against C.
Critics complained about C's deficiencies and we shot at each other
about the aesthetics of programming. The so-called "Art of Computer
Programming" was taken seriously and a beautiful programme was, well,
a thing of beauty.

> To the rest of the disputants in this thread: what GPL'd software
> are
> *you* releasing this week?  If not, why not?

Good point. I currently not working on anything. Why? I need a job,
but that's another story.

>>>--fja->

=====
There are no stupid questions, but there are a LOT of inquisitive idiots.

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