[ILUG-Social] Perl is a pool language

[Smelly Pooh]

In reply to kevin lyda's flatulent wordings, 
> On Thu, Oct 12, 2000 at 06:33:52PM +0100, Smelly Pooh wrote:
> > In reply to kevin lyda's flatulent wordings, 
> > > On Thu, Oct 12, 2000 at 12:05:49PM +0100, Kathryn Cassidy wrote:
> >  
> > > NOTE: no one get bent out of sorts.  this is my general opinion about
> > > language wars.  it is the craftsmen, not the tool that is responsible for
> > > success or failure.  a programmer's familiarity with a language is very
> > > important *but* that's not an intrinsic quality of the language.
> > Surely your chances of success is a combination of both, if I were to cut down
> > a tree I'd rather have a chainsaw than a penknife
> 
> i note that you failed to include my comment about "reasonable languages."

I didn't think it was that important a point

> obviously you don't use z80 assembler to program a vax.  you don't use
> lisp to progam a 4mhz embedded system with 16k of ram.

Lisp isn't as big and slow as you might think, optimising Lisp compilers can
outpace pretty much anything but straight C & assembly

> all languages have targets and restrictions.  where i work i wouldn't
> choose scheme to do a project not because of any deficiency in scheme,
> but because my team isn't up on scheme.  that's *our* restriction, not
> the language.  if i worked with a bunch of clueless and undisciplined
> programmers i wouldn't use perl.

LOL, most PERL programmers I've come across are clueless and undisciplined

> but they *are* disciplined, they are good, and so they write good, readable
> and maintainable code.

Perhaps they do, but some languages are more implicitly readable and
maintainable than others no matter how good your programmers are.  Haskell is
a good example, it is a pure functional language, much of the code can be
proved to be correct via mathematical methods, it's more expressive than PERL
yet more consistent and for most generic problems (e.g not something a
language might specialise in like cat in PERL) I can write shorter, more
readable and easier to maintain code for you than in another language.

Quick Sort:
qSort []        = []
qSort (x:xs)    = qSort [y | y <- xs, y < x] ++
                  [x] ++
                  qSort [y | y <- xs, y >= x]

Fibonacci Sequence (as a self recursive, infinite list):
fib = 1:1:zipWith(+) fib (tail fib)

Sieve of Eratosthenes prime number generator
prime = sieve [2..]
  where sieve (x:xs) = x : sieve [ y | y <- xs, y `mod` x /= 0 ]