Evil, Evil Everywhere (was Re: [oclug] Test Shows 99.99% of High School Seniors Can't Read Perl)

[Milan Budimirovic]

Francis Pinteric wrote:

> What unadulterated unmitigated gall! The sad part is that despite the
> fact that this is all tongue in cheek, there are people who actually
> think that Perl is language worthy enough to merit global knowledge
> by young people. 

Then again there are also people who still can't say "web developer"
without laughing. :=))

> It's not as if it were C or anything. Gee... Maybe
> I'll join the Programmers Against Perl group. Not that I have
> anything against Perl, per se despite that it is big, bloated and
> lacks aesthetic (which makes it a Bad Language, hee, hee).
> 

As someone who uses it every day, I would argue that Perl is ugly
because the problems it is typically asked to solve are ugly. Sometimes
there is just no way to beautify HTML or regular expressions. To
paraphrase Damian Conway, the Perl programmer is always butting his head
up against two forces of nature: entropy and human stupidity. With the
news filtering software that I develop and manage, this isn't just a
cute one-liner; it's a fact of life. I use Perl because it's part
programming language, part garbage disposal, and the reality is that
there's nothing quite like it for dealing with bad text data. In a
perfect world it wouldn't exist, but we don't live in a perfect world.