[ILUG-Social] Perl is a pool language

[Niall O Broin]

On Thu, Oct 12, 2000 at 01:57:31PM +0100, Joe Desbonnet wrote:

> I believe you.  And perhaps Perl5 in a good development environment is
> maintainable. But in my experience, unless there is very tight control over
> coding practices, the whole thing quickly degenerates into an unholy mess.

I'm a Perl fan, but this can be all too true. I've just had to revisit a 300
line (using a few hundred lines more in a library, but they haven't changed)
program and my head hurts. In fairness to Perl, the fault is mine. But if I'd
written the same program in C it would have been much bigger, source wise,
and if I'd written it as badly, I'd never have understood it again. I've a
gut feeling that I couldn't have written it as messily in Lisp, but as it's
been a while since Lisp paid for my groceries, I couldn't have written it in
Lisp at all :-)

> Of course that will happen with any language/tools if the development
> process is broken, but I think it happens a whole lot faster with Perl.

Everything happens a whole lot faster with Perl :-)

> I think the language suffered from adhoc growth over about a decade. And it
> seems that OO was an after thought.

Now what popular descendant of BCPL does that remind me of ?

> TCL and Python are much cleaner scripting languages IMHO, 

Whatever about Python (because I don't know it at all - I can't bring myself
to look at a language where white space is significant) I feel TCL is a much
less expressive language than Perl (though I have to admit to not knowing it
as well as I know Perl) - ideally suited for its design purpose as an
embedded tool language, perhaps.

> and much of what you get at CPAN is available for those languages too.

Much, but nowhere near all.

> Anyway -- I prefer to compile my code which rules out all of the above.

Doesn't rule out Perl :-)



Regards,


Niall

P.S. Have any of you read Damian Conway's OO Perl book ?