26 Dec
2019
26 Dec
'19
3:33 p.m.
On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 12:49:20PM +0100, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo wrote:
This reminds me of something Erik Naggum said (about
another language,
and in harsher words (as was his wont), but the underlying point about
the language affecting how problems are solved is the same):
"It's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language
rewards
idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done."
That's true but idiots can write bad code in any language, there is no
way to make up for bad programmers.
In defense of perl, well perl4, I wrote almost an entire source management
system in perl. I rewrote it twice (so 3 attempts), and the last version
was very maintainable perl. I had to be disciplined about it but I got
to a point that I wrote perl that I could debug 6 months later.
If you are talking about perl5/6, yeah, never warmed up to that. Perl4
was a pleasant mix of sed/awk/maybe Cish that I liked a lot.