On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 06:40:49PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote: > On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 09:29:20PM +0000, Will Newton wrote: > > On Thursday 19 Feb 2004 8:22 pm, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > > All well-written perl is like this. If it's not clean and precise then > > > it's bad perl. The fact that there is a lot of bad perl around does > > > not affect this. > > > > In my experience it is not so much that there is bad Perl, which there is, but > > that Perl doesn't seem to scale to large teams. The "there's more than one > > way to do it" idea hurts in big teams, you have to pick one way and stick to > > it, or you get a hairball of conflicting styles. This is a problem with any > > language, but Perl's idiosyncratic and extremely flexible syntax seems to > > exascerbate the problem. > > This is precisely the point and precisely why I switched from a huge > Perl fan to a huge Python fan. (And, incidentally, why I am probably > going to switch from Python to OCaml or Ruby before too long...) > > Perl... does... not... scale. Yes... it... does. You... write... bad... perl... that's... all. > Perl's problem is not just There's More Than One Way To Do It, vs. > Python's "there's one right way to do it". It's also that the way of > doing some things -- *especially* OOP things -- are kludgy and fragile. I have never seen this form of argument in any scenario which was not backed up solely by defining "kludgy and fragile" as "that way", without justifying why it might be a bad idea. It usually just means "I've decided what the answer will be and am now going to make the scenario fit that answer". > For a short program that does a great deal of parsing, just reading from > stdin and writing out, a good Perl programmer will be able to whip it > out quicker than a good Python programmer. For a larger application > with complex interactions, a good Python programmer will likely be able > to whip it out in about the same amount of time as the Perl programmer > maintain or enhance it, and probably have fewer bugs to start with. I > have personal experience with this, having written both types of > applications in both languages. That means you're not a good perl programmer. That's all it means. In fact, it's a good definition of "bad $language programmer". What I think you meant to say is: For a short program that does a great deal of parsing, just reading from stdin and writing out, a *bad* Perl programmer will be able to whip it out quicker than a good Python programmer. Which is probably still true. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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